Skate Spot Density: 20 World Cities Ranked
City Guides ·
We measured the distance between 3,025 mapped skate spots in 20 cities. The city with the most spots finished 17th. Full method, table and caveats.
Forty-one skate spots sit within a 500 metre walk of a rail on Madison Street in downtown Seattle. That is the tightest concentration of skateable street anywhere in this dataset, which covers 3,025 spots across 20 cities. It is not in Barcelona. It is not in Paris.
Seattle also ranks 13th of 20 on city-wide density. Both of those things are true at once, and that is the whole problem with ranking cities by any single density number.
So we computed several, and we will show you where each one lies to you.
Spot counts are close to worthless
Los Angeles has 508 mapped spots, more than any other city here. It also has a median nearest-neighbour distance of 293 metres, which puts it 17th of 20. The two furthest-apart spots in the LA file are 69.7 kilometres from each other. One of them is the Ghetto Rock Cliff Spot out on Paseo Del Mar in San Pedro. You are not skating both in a day, or in a week.
Rotterdam is the mirror image. It has 32 spots, dead last by count, and finishes 6th by spacing at a 163 metre median. RSI on Witte de Withstraat has Westblaak 138 metres away and three more shops inside 320 metres.
Rank the 20 cities by count, then by median spacing, and Los Angeles falls 16 places. Chicago climbs 11. Rotterdam climbs 14. If a guide tells you a city is good because it has a lot of spots, it has told you about the city's surface area.
The densest 500 metres we have mapped
For every spot we drew a 500 metre circle and counted what fell inside. The best circle in each city answers "how much can you skate before you move the car."
Seattle wins it outright with 41. The Madison Street circle picks up the Federal Building at 1015 2nd Avenue, a set of 12 on 2nd, capped ledges at 999 3rd Avenue, and walls down on 1st. All 41 are street spots at separate addresses. Seattle is 93% street overall, which ties it with San Francisco and Denver behind Atlanta's 99%.
San Francisco is second with 30, packed into Rincon Hill and the Embarcadero around Rincon Center and the Sailors Union of the Pacific. Montréal and Lyon tie at 28, Montréal's centred on a low to high downtown and Lyon's on Carhartt Lyon in the Presqu'île. Chicago's Loop returns 25, including Chase Plaza. Barcelona's best circle, around Plaza Villa de Madrid, holds 22. Brussels manages 21 around the Rail du Sablon, with Mont des Arts 333 metres out.
Paris returns 17, at Fontaine des Innocents next to Les Halles. That is a lower number than Seattle's, and it is not a knock on Paris. Paris has 438 spots inside a 90 square kilometre footprint. It does not concentrate into one mega-cluster because it does not have to. Density that is even across a city and density that spikes in one plaza district are different goods, and the 500 metre circle only measures the second one.
Los Angeles, for the record, has a 19-spot circle downtown around the T-Funk Spot, US Bank Tower and Pershing Square. LA is not a sparse city. It is a dense city with 3,000 square kilometres of nothing attached to it, and averaging over that is what kills the number.
The table
Sorted by median nearest-neighbour distance, lowest first. Hull area is the convex hull of the city's spots, which is tighter and more honest than a bounding box.
| City | Spots | Hull km² | Spots/km² | Median NN | Best 500m circle | Widest span | Street | Park | Shop | |---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---| | Chicago | 104 | 200 | 0.52 | 90 m | 25 | 29.5 km | 89% | 8% | 2% | | Brussels | 105 | 41 | 2.57 | 97 m | 21 | 11.7 km | 91% | 6% | 0% | | Montréal | 139 | 375 | 0.37 | 106 m | 28 | 35.1 km | 83% | 16% | 0% | | Marseille | 102 | 120 | 0.85 | 109 m | 19 | 18.1 km | 80% | 8% | 9% | | Bordeaux | 77 | 34 | 2.24 | 122 m | 19 | 8.4 km | 75% | 8% | 13% | | Rotterdam | 32 | 63 | 0.51 | 163 m | 7 | 20.7 km | 59% | 22% | 16% | | Barcelona | 254 | 87 | 2.91 | 166 m | 22 | 14.9 km | 83% | 4% | 9% | | Paris | 438 | 90 | 4.87 | 170 m | 17 | 13.9 km | 86% | 5% | 6% | | Lyon | 160 | 38 | 4.22 | 180 m | 28 | 8.7 km | 82% | 8% | 11% | | Denver | 44 | 452 | 0.10 | 184 m | 10 | 34.9 km | 93% | 5% | 0% | | San Francisco | 227 | 120 | 1.90 | 184 m | 30 | 15.2 km | 93% | 3% | 4% | | Madrid | 71 | 307 | 0.23 | 204 m | 10 | 37.5 km | 66% | 17% | 17% | | Seattle | 142 | 143 | 0.99 | 208 m | 41 | 21.7 km | 93% | 6% | 1% | | Amsterdam | 134 | 108 | 1.24 | 209 m | 11 | 14.9 km | 75% | 11% | 14% | | Milan | 74 | 86 | 0.86 | 233 m | 12 | 12.7 km | 77% | 8% | 15% | | Toronto | 115 | 496 | 0.23 | 243 m | 10 | 37.5 km | 80% | 18% | 2% | | Los Angeles | 508 | 1,727 | 0.29 | 293 m | 19 | 69.7 km | 84% | 6% | 5% | | Berlin | 119 | 273 | 0.44 | 303 m | 8 | 30.3 km | 66% | 16% | 15% | | Atlanta | 83 | 650 | 0.13 | 436 m | 5 | 43.3 km | 99% | 1% | 0% | | San Diego | 97 | 848 | 0.11 | 570 m | 6 | 52.8 km | 86% | 7% | 7% |
Type percentages are of each city's full breakdown, so they do not sum to 100. The remainder is private spots and DIY.
Method
Every number above comes from the spot coordinates, not from anybody's opinion. The script is reproducible and runs with no dependencies beyond the Python standard library.
Median nearest-neighbour distance. For each spot, the great-circle distance to the closest other spot in the same city, then the median across all spots. This is the number we trust most. A median ignores the one spot somebody logged in the suburbs, which is exactly the failure mode that wrecks area-based measures.
Area and spots per km². We report the convex hull of each city's spots rather than the bounding box. A bounding box is a rectangle drawn on the extremes, so it charges a city for empty ocean and for every corner its spots never reach.
Best 500 metre circle. Centred on each spot in turn, counting all spots within 500 metres, keeping the maximum.
Widest span. The greatest distance between any two spots in the city.
Where this method breaks
We would rather you cite this with the caveats than without them.
Bounding boxes are badly wrong for some cities, which is why we dropped them. Rotterdam's bounding box is 215 km². Its convex hull is 63 km². The box overstates the real footprint by a factor of 3.4, because the Rotterdam spots run along a diagonal and a rectangle drawn around a diagonal is mostly empty. Madrid is nearly as bad at 0.41. Seattle, Brussels and San Francisco are the best behaved at around 0.72 to 0.75. If you see skate spot density quoted per bounding box kilometre, that number is close to meaningless for a coastal or L-shaped city. The convex hull is better and still imperfect, since it too fills in bays and gaps.
Mapping granularity is a real confound, and it inflates Chicago. Chicago has the lowest median nearest-neighbour distance in the set at 90 metres, but its spots are subdivided more finely than any other city's. Group anything within 150 metres into one location and Chicago's 104 spots become 48, a ratio of 2.17 spots per location, the highest here. San Diego's ratio is 1.05. Redo the spacing on those collapsed locations and Chicago's median goes from 90 metres to 274 metres, behind Bordeaux at 261, Brussels at 262 and Paris at 268. Contributors in the Loop logged individual obstacles where contributors elsewhere logged whole plazas. Seattle has 12 separate spots named "Stairs". Treat the raw spacing column as a measure of both real density and mapping style.
Coverage is contributor-driven, so absence is not evidence. Brussels, Montréal, Denver and Atlanta all show 0% shops. That almost certainly means nobody added them, not that those cities have none. Any city here is an undercount by an unknown amount, and the undercount is not even across cities.
Distance is not effort. Two hundred metres in Bordeaux, which spans 8.4 kilometres end to end and is flat, is not two hundred metres in San Francisco or Seattle. Both of those cities are steep enough that the spacing numbers flatter them. We have no gradient data and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
A few coordinates are duplicated. Barcelona, Paris and Lyon each have two spots logged within a metre of another spot, and Los Angeles has three. That is a handful out of 3,025 and it does not move any median, but it is there.
What the type mix says
Atlanta is 99% street, the highest share here: 82 street spots and one park, and the only city in the set with just two spot types. Montréal, Brussels, Denver and Atlanta report no shops at all. At the other end, Rotterdam is 22% park and Toronto 18%, both cities with real public skatepark provision showing up in the data.
Shops cluster where the scene has retail depth. Madrid at 17%, Rotterdam at 16%, Milan at 15%, Berlin at 15% and Amsterdam at 14% all carry a shop share more than ten times Seattle's 1%. That says as much about who has been mapping shops as about how many exist, but the European skew is consistent enough to note.