Seattle’s Dog Park Problem

I wanted to provide an alternative perspective to the vocal anti-dog crowd in this forum by showing just how poorly the city of Seattle accommodates the canine population. All data here is sourced from city websites.

Seattle has 489 Parks covering 6441 Acres. Only 15 of those parks have devoted off-leash space covering a paltry 30.71 acres. That means 3% of all parks and 0.47% of park acreage are devoted to off-leash areas. In many parts of the city this means that a dog owner would be required to drive upwards of 20 minutes to reach an overcrowded dog park. Overcrowding can lead to dog fights which further deters use of these limited spaces; only 6 of these off-leash areas are larger than 1 acre in size.

To compare, let’s look to our neighbors to the north in Vancouver. The City of Vancouver has a much smaller park system than Seattle with just 110 parks/natural areas covering only 1600 acres of park land. So you’d think they’d be even less able to provide off-leash space to their residents. However, the opposite is true. Vancouver offers 41 off-leash areas (37% of all parks have an off-leash area) covering 153.7 acres (9.6% of park space devoted to off-leash acreage).

You can see that Vancouver has made it much easier for dog owning residents to stay compliant with leash laws by providing ample space that is more accessible by foot to its residents. A side benefit to having greater off-leash area coverage is the reduction in car trips for travel to dog parks.

Seattle Parks (and King County at large) is simply letting down all residents by failing to expand off-leash access as this lack of access results in residents breaking the law and using other open spaces as off-leash areas. If we want to solve this issue we need to pressure the city to offer a park system that works for ALL users.