How close should you live to a park?

I woke up one morning and thought, "No one should have to walk more than X minutes to get to a park." I literally rolled over in bed, grabbed my phone, and wrote down that exact phrase in my notes app. I'm not sure why I was channeling my inner Leslie Knope, but I thought it'd be fun to do another Google Maps project about Colorado Springs.

First, I needed a list of all the parks in Colorado Springs. I challenged myself to try and find a list without using Google, so I went straight to coloradosprings.gov and mentally prepared myself to dredge through a poorly-organized government website. Joke's on me, because I found exactly what I needed at coloradosprings.gov/parks! Included in that page was a custom map showing all the parks I needed.

The nice thing about having everything plotted in Google Maps is that you can easily click the three-dot-menu > Download KML, which is a friendly format that shows the data like this:

      <Placemark>
        <name>Ivywild Park</name>
        <styleUrl>#icon-1720-0F9D58</styleUrl>
        <Point>
          <coordinates>
            -104.8302311,38.8109999,0
          </coordinates>
        </Point>
      </Placemark>

With that, I chucked the file into Claude, which can search the internet, and asked it for ideas to identify spaces in the city that don't have many parks compared to other parts. It wasn't able to do a very good job at first, and before I could refine things, I noticed it referenced something called a "ParkScore."

What's a ParkScore? Clicking the link brought me to the Trust for Public Land's Colorado Springs page. My first thought was, "Who do these people think they are to arbitrarily give my city a 'ParkScore?'" Then I saw they linked to a tool that is way cooler than anything I even imagined for this project.

OK, this is pretty cool. The green parts of the map show higher park concentration, and purple parts show lower park concentration. It factors in population density, city borders, and walking distances, among others. They even answered my "how many minutes should X be" question with "ten minutes." I guess they really know what they're doing.

I'm happy to see 77% (as of May 2025) of my neighbors live near a park. I ended the night by researching a little bit more about this nonprofit, then making a small donation. I hope they keep up the good work!