Calculating access to parks and other polygonal resources: A description of open-source methodologies

Public health studies routinely use simplistic methods to calculate proximity-based “access” to greenspace, such as by measuring distances to the geographic centroids of parks or, less frequently, to the perimeter of the park area. Although computationally efficient, these approaches oversimplify exposure measurement because parks often have specific entrance points. In this tutorial paper, we describe how researchers can instead calculate more-accurate access measures using freely available open-source methods. Specifically, we demonstrate processes for calculating “service areas” representing street-network-based buffers of access to parks within set distances and mode of transportation (e.g., 1-km walk or 20-minute drive) using OpenRouteService and QGIS software. We also introduce an advanced method involving the identification of trailheads or parking lots with OpenStreetMap data and show how large parks particularly benefit from this approach. These methods can be used globally and are applicable to analyses of a wide range of studies investigating proximity access to resources.