HomeMy WebLinkAbout2012-11-12 PACKET 10.A.Who, What, Where & How Around t
��Illl�lt®
Universally Popular: Of the
seven playgrounds observed
this spring over a one -week
period in College Station, Texas,
the accessible Independencc
Playground was the most used
A Case Study of Playground Accessibility
`i°ht_ Universal AiAractive¢!(4 s Of ldI1MA'idiiy A"(� ''Ssihle Play f°I�vi��;�� ;
By Kenneth Hurst, MLA, RLA, ASLA, CLARB, CPSI
he last 20 years intheplay-
ground industry have seen
the introduction of numer-
ous playground safety and
accessibility regulations.
With the advent of the Americans with Dis-
abilities Act in 1990, the Access Board's
playground accessibility rules of 2000, and
the latest Department of Justice Standards
published in 2010, accessibility has been
at the forefront of recreation facility and
playground development. Designers have
consistently advocated the value of highly
accessible facilities, but there is often con-
siderable cost involved in adding ramps
and the additional square footage of sur-
facing needed. The question often posed
is: How can the cost of these special -use
facilities be substantiated? A designer's
experience and intuition, having seen the
popularity of these playgrounds, is com-
monly the primary avenue of support.
The challenge in this era of evidence-
based design is to support a designer's
judgment with empirical evidence. The
hypothesis tested for this article is that
playgrounds designed to high universal
accessible design standards, going be-
yond the minimum requirements of ADA,
are more attractive to children of all abilities
and are highly attractive to the generalpop-
ulation of users, perhaps even more so than
play environments designed to the mini-
mum standard accessibility requirements.
An informal study to address a design-
er's curiosity was undertaken this spring
in a quiet North Texas town. The setting
is an older, medium population, nicely
developed, largely bedroom suburban
community that is generally well main-
tained. The city's residents have high ex-
pectations for their community services
and parks. As a result, the department of
parks and recreation has responded by
providing a high level of quality develop-
ment, and it goes to great lengths in the
maintenance of all its facilities. The parks
all have a close relationship to the neigh-
boring residences, are all in nice natu-
ralized settings with abundant shade
provided by old growth trees, and have
", 16 Parks & Recreation AUGUST 2012 WWW.NRPA.ORG
a
4:
E
an abundance of other natural ameni-
ties. This presents a unique opportunity
to study playground use while holding a
number of othervariables in the equation
at relatively similar levels.
Seven parks in the city have play-
grounds, all within two or three miles of
each other. All of the playgrounds were
built by the same manufacturer and six of
the seven designed by the same designer.
The most noticeable difference among the
facilities is that the playground at Indepen-
dence Park was designed with a high lev-
el of universal accessibility, having nearly
complete ramp accessibility to the elevat-
edplayground components. The surfacing
at Independence Park is a unitary poured -
in -place surface which is also found at one
of the other playgrounds. The remaining
five have engineered wood fiber as the
surfacing. Interestingly, the counts ofplay-
ground components are similar, in the mid
30s, at two of the other playgrounds in the
system. Although ramps are used at Inde-
pendence Park, other transfer elements
that accommodate individuals with disabil-
ities may work better for other playgrounds
and still meet ADA and DOJ standards.
With permission of the parks and rec-
reation department, during the week of
March 12th, user counts were conducted
at each of the playgrounds. Each location
was visited in the same sequence within
an hour's time of each other, on a six -mile
circuit. Six counts were made record-
ing the number of children on the play-
grounds. The weather was comfortably
moderate and similar during the entire
week, being overcast and between 68
and 75 degrees Fahrenheit throughout. In
an attempt to equalize the size of the play
areas, user counts were divided by the
number ofplay events to arrive at a num-
ber of children per play event. It is inter -
estiing to note that the number of children
per play event was recorded to be signif-
icantly greater at Independence Park in
comparison with any of the other parks.
Admittedly, this has been a small, infor-
mal study, based on a designer's intuition
that play environments designed to the
highest levels of universal accessibility
have a high universal attractiveness to the
general public. It was undertaken over a
short period of time, applying some ba-
sic principles of research design. While
this was a small data set without exten-
sive controls or statistical analysis, and re-
stricted by available time, the short time
period also limited the number of dis-
tracting variables that could legitimately
be encountered during an extended data
collection period. The user survey data
returned significantly more children per
play event at Independence Park than any
of the other parks in the system.
In conclusion, the user counts appear to
support and give credibility to the design-
er's intuition and hypothesis that universal-
ly accessible playgrounds are of high value
and can be more attractive to everyone,
regardless of their abilities. In light of the
generally increased cost ofthese facilities,
the data also appears to support the in-
creased expense of building play envi-
ronments designed with the highest levels
of ramp accessibility. Further study of the
issue is certainly warranted, but it is clear
with this study that play environments de-
signed usingthe highest levels ofuniversal
accessibility are not limited to those living
with disabilities and have universal attrac-
tiveness to the general population.
KENNETH HURST graduatedinlg8o
from Iowa State University with a degree in
landscape architecture and has spent his
career largely in parks and recreation with
the laSM years focusing on play
environments. He has recently been
accepted into the Department of -
Landscape Architecture at Texas A &M
University where he will begin work this fall
semester on a Ph.D. degree in urban and
regional sciences.
WWW.NR PA. ORG AUGUST 2012 Parks & Recreation 17