Choose your own adventure: How data source selection shapes urban accessibility analyses

Overview & Synopsis

Urban park accessibility shapes mental health, physical well-being, and community cohesion. Measuring it is thus central to urban and landscape planning. Although researchers have debated the impacts of different accessibility measures on analysis results, scant attention has been paid to variability from data source selection. Do the results of accessibility analyses vary depending on the dataset used to define park locations and attributes? We compare four widely used geospatial data sources - OpenStreetMap, Esri, SafeGraph, and The Trust for Public Land - by validating their data and measuring park access across two cities. These datasets purport to cover the same spatial features, but our findings reveal wide discrepancies in accessibility results, driven by differences in dataset completeness, coverage, and accuracy between the sources. We provide guidelines for selecting and carefully validating data for accessibility analyses, as these decisions directly impact the accuracy and equity of downstream urban park planning and decision-making.