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The potential of public parks being able to promote mental and physical health of the public is widely discussed in recent years. However, the report for public park issues becomes a norm too. One of the issues being debated is the maintenance drawback in Malaysian public parks, implicating underutilisation of the parks. To address the issue, this paper aims to examine the maintenance priority towards public park's features and facilities in Malaysia by considering the park visitors' expectation and demand. A questionnaire survey was distributed to the park users and visitors with 1658 valid questionnaire responses. A mean analysis was performed to rank the maintenance of park features and facilities in both visitors' perspective and actual experience. Subsequently, Wilcoxon signed-rank test was deployed to examine the difference between visitors' perspective and actual experience towards maintenance of the park features and facilities. The findings determine ten park features and facilities that should be prioritised in respect to their maintenance. Furthermore, it is proven that significant difference occurs between visitors' perspective and actual experience towards all park features and facilities. As a result, the study confirms the need of improving the park maintenance process and recommends the introduction of maintenance prioritisation towards the park features and facilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parks are recognised as important elements of urban green infrastructure and for providing many benefits to city residents. In countries where urban growth is unplanned and sprawling, green space provision falls behind, inadequate amounts are provided or spaces are not located in the most effective places. Tehran, the capital of Iran, has experienced huge growth in population and corresponding sprawl in recent years. There has been no study of the effectiveness of parks as part of the range of green spaces in the city − their location, accessibility within the urban structure, relationship to the socio-demographic character of the population, amount per capita or quality and condition. Using a combination of existing data supplemented by new data from site surveys, this study firstly looked at the citywide scale of public open space in relation to population and socio-economic patterns. Second, a representative sample of 16 parks was examined in terms of their accessibility within the urban street structure using space syntax. The syntactical results were correlated with several different aspects of each park collected and rated on a 1–5 scale. The results showed a wide range of availability of parks with no specific pattern related to whether the district is better off or poor. The data on green space per district was often heavily biased by the presence of large areas of forest park or non-recreational land which gives a false picture.Many of the best parks are poorly integrated into the street network and found in the better off districts yet are very popular because they are “destination” parks in cooler, hilly areas. Poorly integrated parks in the inner city districts tended to show lower levels of maintenance, were often little used and had vandalism. Much more attention is needed to provide green space in an equitable way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Park-and-Ride (PNR) facilities are a commonly used means of making a transit system more widely available. However, given that a PNR passenger must drive for part of the trip, this approach to transit provision has an ambiguous influence on vehicle kilometers traveled (VKT). The impact of PNR on VKT is highly dependent of how PNR users would choose to travel if the PNR facilities were not available. Given that this issue has received little attention in a US context, we use the light rail system in Charlotte, North Carolina as a case study to examine the potential impact of PNR removal on VKT. Using a travel survey of PNR passengers, we estimate the VKT currently generated while driving to and from the rail stations and then estimate how VKT would change under various PNR removal scenarios that assume different behavioral responses. We find that, under the most realistic scenarios, PNR removal would lead the average PNR passenger to increase her driving by 8-15VKT per round trip. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The economic impacts of parks on adjacent property values have been extensively studied in the literature. Studies on how individual park facilities influence property values, however, are rarely found. While park facilities are essential for providing diverse recreational opportunities, their economic impacts should also be considered when designing a park system. This study, therefore, applied hedonic regression models to examine the impacts of park facilities on neighboring residential property values within the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The park facilities examined are divided into two categories: passive (i.e. passive recreation space, water features, and gardens) and active (i.e. children's play grounds, ball fields, tennis courts, skate park, etc.). Analysis of results suggests that park facilities for passive recreation, with the exception of urban gardens, are likely to have positive impacts on property values. Active facilities, especially skate parks and children's play areas, tend to introduce negative impacts. The impacts of facilities on property values decrease over distance zones from parks, which is consistent with the findings in the literature. Moreover, the impacts of facilities on property values vary with size, as gardens and most active facilities are more likely to be beneficial in small parks, while water features in large parks tend to increase property values. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: There is a growing body of evidence indicating that exposure to, and activities in, nature have beneficial effects on human health. Since a majority of people in many countries live in urban areas, availability and use of urban green areas is of increasing importance to public health. In the present study we measured urban residents’ (Trondheim, Norway) recreational preferences for urban park landscapes varying in vegetation density, and aimed at an identification of background variables and environmental value orientations that we hypothesised to influence such preferences. The results showed that moderately dense scenes received the highest preference ratings. Socio-demographic variables and value orientations predicted preferences for moderate to densely vegetated scenes: A curvi-linear effect of age of respondents was found, with subjects in their mid-40s expressing a higher preference for moderate to dense vegetation, compared to younger and older subjects. Preference for moderate to dense vegetation also increased as the educational levels of the respondents increased. The preference was lower among people living in apartment blocks, relative to those living in detached houses. Of attitudinal and value-related variables, interest in wildlife, and pro-ecological value orientation (measured with the NEP scale) predicted preference for urban parks with moderate and dense vegetation. The existence of preference for relatively dense vegetation in urban parks in segments of the population has consequences for the designing of urban parks in Norway. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]