«
»

Park design mistreats public

I’m writing about a little park along a major regional paved trail. The park will go nameless here…no sense embarrassing the design team or owner. It’s actually a nice park, depending on the weather.

The temperature was in the low 80s yesterday when I stopped on a long bike ride. The park has lots of benches and low walls for sitting, and there were a dozen bicyclists hanging out, along with others presumably from the neighborhood. The benches and low walls, all in the sun, were empty.

Instead, the bicyclists — nearly every one – huddled in the shade of trees along the water’s edge, despite the lack of seating there. There were five or six good shade spots, one paved and the others not. Each shade spot was staked out by between one and three people. Thankfully the paved spot had enough room for a couple of us to share.

The park was renovated not long ago, and got a new restroom building. It has no awnings, and provides no shelter from either sun or rain. Unless you want to hang out with the toilets.

Here’s my question: Do park designers REALLY have so little understanding of how parks are used? Don’t they know that bicyclists are generally overheating when we stop during a summer ride? Or that on many other days, for familes too, it’s reassuring to be able to dash under an awning if it suddenly starts raining?

In the case of this park, simply moving a few benches to the shady areas would give a lot of tired people a respite on a hot day. And an awning, anywhere, would be nice.

This entry was posted by Matt Hays on Sunday, July 25th, 2010 at 2:03 pm and is filed under Architecture, Neighborhoods, Parks and open space, Seattle lifestyle, transportation, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

  • Catherine

    Matt – I suggest you spend some quality time in our all too numerous problem parks. Awnings and benches under trees, attract and shelter addicts, year round. These features get taken out because of that. So why pay to install them in the first place? I realize this isn’t how you (or I) would prefer to use parks, but the design you mentioned reflects the reality of how they are used.

  • matt hays

    Taking benches away simply concentrates the problem — same number of rule breakers on fewer benches.

    We need more parks Downtown for a bunch of reasons. One is that the ratio of rule breakers will decline on a per-user and per-acre basis. Downtown Portland is a good example….lots of drunks and punks, but they have good usable parks because the bad elements are spread out.

    But the park I’m talking about isn’t Downtown and doesn’t appear to have an issue with street drunks. It’s a design issue.

  • Brian

    Go ahead and name the park. I would not worry about “embarassing” the design team. The city and its designers/planners need good criticism and evaluation of its public spaces.

    Without knowing exactly what space you are talking about, I’m going to guess and say that costs and value engineering played a role here.

    And as a daily bike commuter and bike recreation enthusiast, I’m not really concerned about park benches or awnings. Shade is nice, but not essential. And as you pointed out, people adapted to the situation. You can usually find shade somewhere. Furthermore, how many 80+ days we get a year? And 80+ isn’t really that hot.

    In regards to rain, go to Greenlake (which would be funny if that was the park you were talking about). I see people there in the rain/mist all the time.