I’m becoming more and more concerned about how much money, money that belongs to you as a taxpayer, is being wasted on skatepark construction. No, I don’t mean that skatepark construction is a waste of money, but building skateparks that don’t get used is, and I’m afraid that public skatepark failures are the rule rather than the exception.
So here’s what I’d like to see in this post. A huge list of public skatepark failures. Post links to photos, post details about public skateparks you’ve seen that have been built wrong. Give as much detail as possible. This blog does get read, and maybe it can be an influence on some city planner who happens to do a search when his city decides to build a skatepark, and maybe something we post here can make a difference in how that skatepark is designed and built.
Here are some other posts on this site about skatepark construction:
Let’s play math! Yes, math is fun! Let me prove it.
Let’s assume we were charged with establishing a baseline guideline regarding the minimum space needed for a skateboarder to enjoy themselves. I submit that value is about 500 square feet. Why?
One kick….two kick…set up, trick, roll out, turn around, and do it again. 50 feet long x 10 feet wide = 500 sq/ft.
For what it’s worth, a basketball court is 4,700 sq/ft, and there are 10 players in a regulation game. 4,700 / 10 = 470 sq/ft.
Stick around. This gets killer.
The National Parks and Recreation Association reports that there are 11,000,000 skateboarders in the US. Their estimate is the most conservative available (Boardtrac reports something like 13 million and others as high as 20 million) but let’s stick with values people will believe…such as those coming from something called the “National Parks and Recreation Association.”
In 2000 the US Census reported 285,000,000 peeps in the US. The NPRA reports 11 million skateboarders. That means we make up fully 3.86% of the US population.
Here’s where the rubber hits the road:
Kettering Ohio just received a new Plaza. 40,000 sq/ft. A real monster. But how well will this serve the local skaters?
57,502 = the number of people living in Kettering
40,000 sq/ft = size of the new Skate Plaza
2,219 = approximate number of skaters in Kettering (3.86% of the population)
That means that the new Skate Plaza makes available a full 18 sq/ft per skater for those in Kettering. Just to break it down for you, 18 sq/ft is a square 4 feet by 4.5 feet…or a strip 2 feet wide by 9 feet long.
To be more realistic:
Kettering is firmly within the Dayton Ohio metropolitan area. Look at a map and see for yourself. As a skater you know that skaters from throughout Dayton will come to the new plaza. Let’s re-calibrate:
1,250,000 = Dayton Metro population
48,246 = number of skaters in Dayton metro area
Using the same math as above, that leaves 0.83 sq/ft per skater, or an area about the size of a smallish brownie.
So what should we do? 500 sq/ft per skater….48,246 skaters in Dayton….that’s 24,123,000 sq/ft of skatepark - BASELINE, just to ensure a minimum 500 sq/ft per skater.
Current design+build rates for a skatepark run about $15 sq/ft (plaza) to $25 sq/ft (tranny), so we are talking about a city like Dayton spending $361,845,000 - $603,075,000 to make sure every skater had enough area per skater. Yes: 360 to 600 million dollars, or about $7,500 to $12,500 per skater in the Dayton area, or about the price of a good used car for each skater.
Before you freak out, remember that it took nearly 100 years for there to be so many baseball fields, basketball courts, etc. This stuff we see all around us…it didn’t happen over night.
What I’m trying to illustrate here is that skateparks are part of the answer…but not ALL of the answer. Sure, we can push cities to raise money for skateparks, but I’ll be darned if I’m going to be forced into overcrowded skate prisons and banned from the streets. Forced to wait 30-60 years before enough parks are built to address the need. I want to skate NOW.
A 40,000 sq/ft plaza should cost about $600,000+, but even in Portland, Oregon it took a heck of a lot of work just to raise $511,000. We’d wait forever to get our tame request for just 500 sq/ft per skater.
Our recommendation? Aggressively push for the legitimization of street skating. Again: we are a full 3.86% of the US population. Why be meek? An equitable distribution of parks won’t exist within our lifetimes, and we sure as heckfire aren’t going to stand for continued criminalization. We’re going for the throat: remove skate stoppers.
On that note, SPS advocates in Tacoma went directly to the city and received approval to remove skate stoppers in some areas, creating defacto street skating spots. We encourage this.
When it comes to skateboarding…and politics, the meek do not inherit the earth. Be aggressive and know that there’s 11,000,000 of us.
Wait: before you say “what about damage?” I have an answer. Engineering is a discipline that responds to presented challenges. If engineers were forced to factor for skateboard trucks and the occasional tempered steel peg, they’d be forced to address this constraint by avoiding low-grade concrete in favor of something like granite (a natural stone with a hardness scale of 8…just below diamond).
Skateboarding has been aggressively criminalized for 25 years and all efforts have failed. Time for cities to be forced to accept the truth, and deal with it in a responsible manner. Sort of like how they’ve done in Tacoma, by creating skate zones where street skating can be enjoyed “in the wild.”
Now that’s some fine math. More than I’d be willing to do for all you ingrates. I like the part about how Dayton is going to buy all of us used cars.