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| LA's Spring Street parklets feature a variety of seating options, like these swing seats, as well as exercise bikes, tables, landscaping, and even a foosball table. |
As more and more cities begin to question the value of flooding their urban areas with surface parking, new ideas for street space have begun to catch on. Parklets, made popular through events like
Parking Day, transform on-street parking spaces into small public parks and represent a relatively cheap and easy way to increase park space in otherwise built-out neighborhoods.
San Francisco and New York have conducted limited evaluations of their parklets, and have found that they seem to increase pedestrian volumes while have a neutral to positive impact on local businesses.
An Assessment of the Spring Street Parklets, a collaborative effort of the UCLA Complete Streets Initiative and Parklet Studies, includes a more detailed evaluation of two of Downtown Los Angeles' four new parklets. Using a combination of bicycle and pedestrian counts, activity mapping, and interviews with users and businesses owners, the report compares conditions in parklet neighborhoods before and after installation.
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| Volunteers mapped the location of parklet users at different times of day as part of the evaluation process. |
The assessment results show increases in both bicycling and walking in the vicinity of the parklets after installation, though for both modes men are over-represented. In part this could be due to the continued perception of safety concerns for female walkers and bikers. At the same time, there was no noticeable change in parking occupancy in the parklet areas, suggesting that at least one common concern (the possibility of a parking shortage created by the removal of spaces for parklets) may not be as likely as many believe. Similarly, concerns about pet waste and panhandling in parklets were not supported by on-the-ground observations at the sites; instead, smoking was by far the most common "nuisance behavior" in the parklets.
