Access to Exercise Opportunities
This indicator reports the percentage of individuals in a county who live reasonably close to a location for physical activity. Locations for physical activity are defined as parks or recreational facilities. The numerator is the 2020 total population living in census blocks with adequate access to at least one location for physical activity (adequate access is defined as census blocks where the border is a half-mile or less from a park, 1 mile or less from a recreational facility in an urban area, or 3 miles or less from a recreational facility in a rural area) and the denominator is the 2020 resident county population. This indicator is used in the 2025 County Health Rankings.
Source
Accessed via County Health Rankings.
Source Description
The ArcGIS Business Analyst and Living Atlas of the World, YMCA & US Census Tigerline Files are combined in ArcGIS Pro to create the measure of Access to exercise opportunities as used in the County Health Ranking 2023. The ArcGIS Business Analyst, for a fee (University of Wisconsin license), provides access to robust, integrated business intelligence, including corporate families, industries, key executives and financial data. The ArcGIS Living Atlas public use USA Parks data provides boundaries of National and State parks and forests, along with County, Regional and Local parks within the United States. The YMCA provides CHRR with a national file identifying YMCA locations with opportunities for physical activity. US Census TIGER/Line Shapefiles are spatial extracts from the Census Bureau’s MAF/TIGER database, containing features such as roads, railroads, rivers, as well as legal and statistical geographic areas. The US Census 2020 tabulation blocks contain 2020 Census population and housing unit counts at the census block level. The 2020 Urban Areas were deliniated with data from the 2020 Census and represent densely developed territory, and encompass residential, commercial, and other non-residential urban land uses.
Methodology
Access to exercise opportunities data was acquired from the University of Wisconsin’s County Health Rankings (CHR). This measure represents the percentage of individuals in a county who live reasonably close to a location for physical activity. Locations for physical activity are defined as parks or recreational facilities. Individuals are considered to have access to exercise opportunities if they:
reside in a census block that is within a half mile of a park, or
reside in an urban census block that is within one mile of a recreational facility, or
reside in a rural census block that is within three miles of a recreational facility.
The numerator is the total 2020 population living in census blocks with adequate access to at least one location for physical activity and the denominator is the 2020 resident county population.
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