They can also be built with those specific intentions in mind. One can be anywhere on the island and be less than 4 km away from a building-free rest area. Granted, size matters, and the very notion of park needs to be defined in order to produce any significant analysis. The Communaut Urbaine de Montr al , in their landuse classification, have defined three types of parks, whose attached adjectives are fairly good indicators of size as well as jurisdiction. They are your everyday parks where you go for a swing or when you are brown-bagging it on a sunny day.
Regional parks are generally under provincial jurisdiction, and are often more thickly forested.
Cross-country trails are usually prevalent in these, and their bigger size tends to attract larger amounts of people. Nature reserves are specially preserved areas, often under study by scientists, and where access is restricted and often paying. This project was mainly concerned with identifying to what extent the distribution of parks in Montreal is done equitably. In other words, I wanted to examine whether access parks is highly spatially variable. Equity is never easily defined, and the number of variables involved in the creation and maintenance of parks are much too great for a simple, ahistorical analysis to be performed and reveal any significant trends.