Assessing the impacts of the Park City Initiative on travel: 15-minute multimodal accessibility to urban parks in Chengdu, China

Accessible urban parks are pivotal to Park City development worldwide; it is also pivotal to examine the effectiveness and inclusivity of Park City policies. Despite growing interest in urban park approachability, a paucity of research has examined the impacts of Park City policies on multimodal accessibility. The Park City Initiative in Chengdu, first proposed in 2018, represents a pioneering development paradigm that seeks to embed accessible urban parks within the city fabric. This study employs Two-Step Floating Catchment Area (2SFCA) and Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) models to quantify the impacts of the Park City Initiative on multimodal accessibility to urban parks within downtown Chengdu. The analytical framework encompasses four travel modes (pedestrian, bus, metro, and highway) within a 15-min threshold, spanning from 2018 to 2026. This analytical approach facilitates the empirical assessment of accessibility transformations attributable to policy implementation. The findings demonstrate that the Park City Initiative has improved urban park accessibility across four travel modes in downtown Chengdu. Notably, the Park City Initiative has catalysed travel mode enhancement, characterized by strengthened pedestrian connectivity and improved metro-based access to urban parks. This research provides empirically grounded and practically applicable insights into accessible urban parks. Reinforcing active travel and enhancing urban equity from the centres to borders can apply to Future Park Cities.