Municipal investment tool
What’s a skatepark or pump track worth to your town? Pick a facility, enter your cost and expected users, and get two separate estimates: what riders gain, and what out-of-town visitors spend. Every assumption is shown, labeled with where it came from, and yours to change.
Average per operating day, all ages, not the peak. Drives visitor spending (P2) only; P1 ignores it.
Drives visitor spending (P2) only; P1 ignores it.
These come from the preset for the facility type and scale you picked. Change one to test it: edited values are outlined, flagged in the results, and carried in a copied link. Each is tagged with how it was obtained.
P1 · User value (economic surplus)
What users gain, in dollars. Not money spent.
What users gain: the dollar value riders place on having this facility, beyond what it costs them to get there. No one receives this money. It’s an estimate of benefit, from one study of one large skatepark.
P2 · Local visitor spending (economic impact)
What out-of-town visitors spend locally, with multiplier
Direct spending, before the multiplier: —
Combined annual value
per year · P1 + P2 for the pillars shown. Not municipal revenue, and not a financial return: it adds a welfare measure to a spending measure.
Where the numbers come from
P1 data is informed by
Kemp, T. (2025). Shred Central: Estimating the user benefits associated with large public skateparks. Journal of Economic Analysis, 4(1):90. doi:10.58567/jea04010004. The study valued one very large skatepark. We scale its result down for smaller facilities; no study has measured a pump track.
P2 data is informed by
Four mountain bike trail studies. No study has measured pump-track or skatepark visitors, so these are a stand-in, not a source: they show what out-of-town riders spend per day at trail networks ($90 to $200), and we scaled our preset spend values down from that by judgment. The out-of-town share is an assumption with no study behind it. The four are not fully independent: the West Virginia figure is partly built from Coldwater.
The 1.72× multiplier is a starting point, not a measured value, and you can change it like any other input (1.0 shows direct spending only). It was once attributed to the Outdoor Industry Association (2022); we could not verify that. More studies, with each source page, are in PMR’s Trail Visitor Spending Ledger.
Not included: maintenance and operating cost, discounting, growth, local spending moved from elsewhere, and youth users (Kemp counts adults only). The two results are shown separately because one measures what users gain and the other what visitors spend.
P1 = construction cost × surplus rate. Kemp’s result is driven by how often and how far people travel, not by what the park cost, so tying it to cost is this tool’s own device. Operating days and daily users do not affect P1.
P2 = average daily users × out-of-town share × operating days × spend per visitor-day × multiplier. Pump tracks serve many children and families, so adult MTB spending is a weak guide to their values; facility scale moves spend more than type does.
Tags on assumptions: J · Judgment: chosen by the author, no source. P · Proxy: scaled from a study of a different activity. Tiers on the four studies: V · Verified: the study’s own direct rider survey. M · Medium: a blended figure, or read through a secondary compilation. Full sources and what has been verified are in the project README on GitHub.
Planning-level estimate for public advocacy. This is not investment advice, a certified economic analysis, an engineering assessment, or a forecast of municipal revenue. Present results alongside the original studies and say which assumptions were changed.
Related tool
Trail Investment ROI Calculator →Building the case for singletrack rather than a wheeled-sport facility? The Trail Investment ROI Calculator runs the same style of economic model against trail projects, synthesized from 13 U.S. trail investment studies, with metric/imperial and international currency toggles.