Recreational visits to urban parks and factors affecting park visits: Evidence from geotagged social media data

Quantifying park use and understanding its driving factors is crucially important for increasing park use and thus human well-being. Previous studies have investigated the effects of different physical and sociocultural factors on park usage using visitor surveys and direct observations of park users, which are usually site specific and time consuming. We quantified and compared the number of visits for different types of parks in Beijing using freely available geotagged check-in data from social media. We investigated how park attributes, park location, park context and public transportation affected the number of park check-in visits, using multiple linear regressions. Despite potential biases in the use of social media data, using a park typology, we found that the number of visits was significantly different among different types of parks. While cultural relics parks and large urban parks had larger numbers of visits, neighborhood parks had higher visitation rates per unit of area. Park size and entrance fees were associated with increased numbers of visits for all types of parks. For parks that mainly serve local residents, the distance to urban center significantly affected park use. The number of bus stops was positively correlated with park visits, suggesting that increased accessibility through public transportation leads to more visits. The results indicated that improving park accessibility via public transportation and planning small, accessible green spaces in residential areas were effective in improving park use.