The six things we score
Each park is rated 0–100 on six axes. They are not measures of how pretty a park is; they measure how well it works as a destination — what is around it, and whether the trip holds up once you get there.
- Vets — how close the nearest veterinary clinic is. We don’t know whether it’s taking new patients or offers emergency care, just how far away it is.
- Pet stores — how easily you can pick up food, a replacement lead or poop bags nearby.
- Cafes — how close the nearest cafe is, whether or not it’s dog-friendly.
- Trails — connected walking beyond the fence line.
- Water — drinking water and swimmable water at the park itself.
- Parking — whether you can reliably leave a car near the entrance.
The overall number
The single score on each park card is the plain, unweighted mean of those six, rounded to the nearest whole number. No axis counts for more than another, and nothing else is folded in — not popularity, not sponsorship, not star ratings.
What is measured, and what is estimated
Four of the six are measured. Vets, pet stores, cafes and trails are computed from OpenStreetMap data: we measure the straight-line distance from the park to the nearest one, and convert it with a fixed scale.
- Vets and pet stores — within half a mile scores 100, a mile 85, two miles 60, three miles 30, five miles 10, and further than that 0.
- Cafes and trails — a tighter scale, because these are places you walk to: a quarter mile scores 100, half a mile 85, a mile 60, two miles 30, and further than that 0.
Trails counts only named paths and waymarked hiking routes. OpenStreetMap tags a suburban pavement much like a river trail, and a name is the most reliable signal that a path is somewhere you would take a dog. The cost of that rule is real: a good unnamed trail is invisible to this score.
Water and parking are observed, not computed. They are properties of the park itself rather than of what is around it, and no mapping database reliably knows whether a particular fountain is switched on in January. So they are checked by hand and dated: water scores 0 with no water, 60 if it runs seasonally — Denver fountains run roughly April through October — and 100 year round. Parking scores 0 with none, 50 for street parking and 100 for a lot. Where a park has been checked, the date and the source are printed on its own page; where it has not, the score is still an older estimate.
What counts as water.A pond, lake, reservoir or year-round creek scores 100: the water is there whatever the month. A drinking fountain or spigot that is shut off for the winter scores 60, and so does a creek that dries up — both give you roughly seven months of the year. A fixture that runs through the winter scores 100. Nothing you would have to bring yourself counts, and neither does standing water or irrigation runoff.
A summer check cannot tell those apart.Seeing a fountain running in August proves only that the park is not dry — it says nothing about January. Where we have checked in the warm months and do not know whether the supply is winterised, we record it as seasonal rather than assume the better answer. 4 of 42 parks have been checked so far.
Scores are recomputed by hand rather than on a schedule, so they change when we rerun them, not continuously.
Mapping data © OpenStreetMap contributors.
Star ratings are not ours
Separately from the six scores, most parks show a star rating and a review count. Those are third-party aggregate figures carried as reference data — they are not collected by us and are not part of the score. A handful of newly added parks have no third-party rating yet, and show neither a star nor a count rather than a zero. Reviews written directly on Denver Dog Parks appear in the reviews section of a park page and are labelled as such.
What sponsorship does not affect
Sponsored parks and listings are sorted higher in the default order and carry a visible badge. Sponsorship never changes a score. Sort by Score and paid placement stops affecting the order entirely. See About for how Denver Dog Parks is funded.
Tell us when we are wrong
A score can still be wrong even where it is measured: an estimate can be a bad judgement, and a computed axis can be reading stale or mistagged map data. If a park’s number does not match what you find on the ground, write to hello@denverdogparks.comand say which axis and why — that’s how both the estimates and the computed axes get checked and corrected.