Accessibility to urban parks for elderly residents: Perspectives from mobile phone data

Many countries are facing an aging population crisis, triggering major concerns over how to best provide services for older people. Parks are an important public service resource for older people living in urban areas. Due to the uneven geographic distribution of parks within a city, elderly people may have unequal access to this resource, based on their socioeconomic status. This park access issue has been under-examined among older populations, who may be more vulnerable and have limited physical mobility. The two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method has been increasingly used to measure access to parks; however, a “catchment area,” defined as the traveling distance to a resource, may be biased against older subjects, due to the lack of behavior-based information within traditional census data. To bridge this methodological gap within the literature, this study sought to estimate park access for the elderly, using the 2SFCA method and new data sources (mobile phone data), in order to determine if older people experience inequitable park access owing to their socioeconomic status. Based on a spatial and multivariate analysis of data collected in Beijing, we find that housing price, the distance to commercial areas and greenspaces are significant influencing factors of the park accessibility; elderly people living in newly built areas, the lower the housing price, the lower accessibility to parks. These findings may assist municipal policy makers in the planning and management of park access for aging citizens.