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Thursday, 20 September 2007 |
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Page 2 of 21
Policy And Issues
Every skatepark has problems just like any other public facility. The trick is to anticipate the potential for undesirable results and plan for prevention. The following is a brief list of things that can happen and things that many people expect to happen at skateparks.
Too Many Skateboarders
Skateparks frequently suffer from overuse. This is especially true when there is only one for a community. Before you build the skatepark you will need to be aware of other skateboarding opportunities nearby. If there are other skateparks or skate spots, the new skatepark will receive a lot of traffic for the first year then settle into a typical base of users. Large and artfully designed parks will have more skateboarding visitors than the community might suggest as visitors to the area will tend to stop and try out
your facility.
Every skatepark can support a comfortable capacity of users. Too few and the place feels desolate; too many and it displaces less confident skaters.
New skateparks will also attract users who were previously inactive. Beginning skaters will see the skatepark as a great opportunity to try out the sport, while lapsed skaters uninterested in recreating in the streets may view the facility as a way to revisit the activity. With a well-designed and built skatepark, the local skateboarding population can easily balloon to unprecedented levels.
Too many skateboarders in a single facility may produce tension within that group as people jostle to get their turns. Young kids learning basic skills may make more experienced skaters wait—sometimes impatiently—for them to clear the area. Again, the best way to address this problem is to acknowledge and deal with the issue through the terrain design. An experienced skatepark designer will be able to control skateboarding traffic within the facility itself and mitigate the risk of collisions and disparate skill levels.
If the skatepark is finished and attracting too much unexpected traffic, there are few options. If the unexpected use is a result of the skatepark being the only sanctioned skateboarding area in the region, the number of park users probably won’t diminish and the best option is to expand upon the facility or identify a second “support spot” in the vicinity. These expansions and/or smaller spots can become places for overflow visitors to skate without fighting the crowds. They can also be very useful to those visitors who wish to skate when events are happening in the skatepark.
A PARENT'S LETTER
One parent's opinion on the needs of skateboarders and the character of skateparks.
Many skateparks attract very young users and their parents in the morning hours before the park becomes dense with users. Some communities, such as West Linn, Oregon, responded to this increasing usage by creating additional, smaller “skate dots” to disperse the activity over a broader area. Solutions like this benefit the main facility by drawing visitors to other destinations as well as offering compelling opportunities closer to home.
Expansions and skate spots don’t need to be large, complex “satellites.” They might be a simple pyramid, ledge, or concrete riser. These simple structures can provide countless options for skaters.
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 10 February 2008 )
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