Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
I mean, what? Pretty much all sprawl containing lots of little kids will have heavily utilized playgrounds. You obviously need soccer fields, baseball diamonds, etc. and age-appropriate play structures.
Though I don't think there's much walking going on, in Canada or U.S., if you're hauling little ones with sports equipment.
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Here's Carmel, IN for example. Indianapolis has suburbia that's fairly typical of the United States, and Carmel is more on the affluent side (as with Oakville), with some efforts towards New Urbanism.
Only about 30% of homes are within a 5 minute walk of a playground, compared to 90%+ for North Oakville.
Also, assuming the area within a 5 minute walk of the playground is fully developed, there would be about 250 homes within that range in this part of Carmel compared to 750 homes within 5 minutes in North Oakville.
The playgrounds do seem less utilized based off streetview, despite the fact that the Carmel streetviews were taken in June-July mostly when the weather was presumably nicer than the 55F sweater weather North Oakville experienced yesterday when I took my pictures. But maybe the Carmel streetviews were taken at 1:30pm when kids were in class.
I'm not sure what sports equipment has to do with this discussion. The pictures I showed weren't of kids playing high school football, it was just spontaneous gatherings of kids/families at playgrounds. Some might've brought balls, frisbees, scooters or tennis rackets, but I see no reason why you couldn't carry those 2 blocks by foot (or ride it in the case of the scooter). There were definitely kids walking to and from these parks when I was there.