Whether you’re a newbie or seasoned skateboarder, chances are you’re always on the lookout for good spots to progress or shred. What are the best places for skateboarding?
Skateparks are typically the best places to skateboard since they’re specifically built for that. However, many other places have smooth paved surface for riding, including:
- Your driveways, garage, and neighborhood
- City sidewalks and parking lots
- Public squares and city plazas
- Street spots, abandoned buildings
- Multi-level parking garages
- Hilly roads
See also: Can You Teach Yourself to Skateboard?
Can you skateboard anywhere?
Once you get comfortable rolling on your board you can easily progress to skating in public spaces such as sidewalks, parks, lots and plazas.
Stick to hard, flat and smooth pavements such as concrete, smooth asphalt and marble tiles. And avoid bumpy and wet pavements.
Some terrains that you should avoid are: dirt settings such as lawns, forests and dirt roads,
surfaces with rocks and pebbles as these can stop you dead in your tracks.
Avoid skating next to fountains or bodies of water as there is the risk of your precious board ending up in the water.
See also: Skateboarding on rough roads
Where to skateboard for beginners
If you live in a house and skateparks are far away, your front driveway is a good starting place to learn standing, rolling on the board and getting familiar with beginner tricks.
Skating in your front yard also gives you the freedom to build or purchase small skate elements such as a 1-foot high flat bar rail, grind box or kicker ramp.
The best approach is to start learning to skate and master the beginner tricks at home prior to moving up to more challenging terrains.
See also: Should a beginner go to a skatepark?
Best places for street riding
Chances are the city you live in has unintentionally built a few ideal spots for skating, like staircases with a handrail or bike ramp, or smooth tiled pavements with marble ledges. These can be easily be spotted by a skater’s eye.
One of the most fun aspects of skateboarding is finding these rare spots and throwing tricks on them. These spots can be found everywhere throughout your city regardless of the type of district (school zone, business district, etc)
You can often find elements such as handrails, stairs, ledges and benches around school yards. Industrial zones and loading docks are good places to find manual pads, ramps, ledges and elevated surfaces.
FindSkateSpots.com provides a community curated list of well known spots across the US and Europe.
However if you want to go off the grid and discover spots on your own, you can do that in a couple of ways:
Skate spot scouting
Drive around in your car, ride a few bus lines, or just cruise around with your board. A good start is to think of a general neighbourhood that can have the needed infrastructure( park, school, public building) and cruise all the streets in that area.
You can also check out a known abandoned building or a dock as these may have unusual but fun elements to skate.
Ask around the community
Once you get to know a few people from your local skate community you can ask for the locations of any spots and perhaps ask them to come along.
Local skate videos
Oftentimes local skaters will know of a handful of spots and will often film themselves skating a certain spot. You can ask or try to find these spots on your own.
Google Maps for spots
If you are new to the area, a fun way to get to know the city’s terrain is to search and roam around in Google Maps and spot any city parks or squares and take a deeper look at the layout using the Street View function.
If you find a new spot don’t forget to share it with local riders and share it online.
How to choose the best skatepark
Things to take into account when choosing the best skatepark include:
- Which features does it have
- How big is the park
- How popular is it with the local scene
- How far is it from where you live
Let’s briefly go over these criteria:
Skatepark features
Skateparks should be rich with many fun obstacles of all heights to suit all the skaters needs.
However if you are just starting out you should avoid any elements that have a large drop,are very slippery from the skate wax or require high ollies.
Instead, use ramps with small inclination, do grinds and slides on curbs and ledges of similar height. Ride flat bar rails that are fairly wide for easier balance.
Skatepark size
Smaller parks can be a pain to ride when many other skateboarders are around. Small crowded skate elements, bumping into each other and not getting enough speed are common results of small parks.
If you are at a small park, make sure to coordinate with other riders on who’s turn it is. Alternatively, try to come at quieter hours of the day.
Skatepark popularity
You will know whether a skate park is functional by the crowds of skaters it attracts. Busy parks are good places to meet new riders and up your game in a fun and supportive environment for newer skaters.
If you don’t like crowds, you can also pick at off-hours and have the whole park to yourself.
Skatepark convenience
Skateparks are built on big empty lots and can often be found on the outskirts of cities. Distance can play a big role in how often you can visit a given skatepark.
Obviously, you should also check if you need to pay to use the facilities.
See also: Is bowl and pool skating hard?
Where to skateboard when it rains
Few things can ruin a great day of skating like the rain. However, you can still skate in an indoor setting. A few great places to skate on rainy days:
- Indoor parks
- Abandoned buildings
- Parking garages
Indoor skateparks
Some skateparks are indoor. These are generally commercially run and require an admission fee to use the facilities.
Indoor skateparks generally feature plywood sheeted obstacles such as funboxes, banks, hubbas and pyramids, and possibly vert elements such as mega ramps, half pipes and quarter pipes.
Abandoned buildings
As long as there’s a roof on top, any place will work for skating when it rains. Some abandoned buildings can be great for skateboarding once set up with DIY skate obstacles made by the local skate community.
Parking garages
Pretty common in urban areas, and easy to access if it rains in the middle of a skate session.
Parking garages offer some of the most smooth surface for your wheels.
However there are not many obstacles or surfaces to spice up your skating. You will be limited to doing slappy grinds on curbs or jumping them.
You can bring a flat or round grind bar to make your skating more exciting.
Best cities to skateboard in
The following is a list of cities with some of their most famous skate spots. These are ranked by the amounts of mentions in skateboard magazines, blogs and input from the community.
- Barcelona: MACBA, Sants Station,
- New York City: Black Hubba, LES Coleman Skatepark
- Los Angeles: Stoner Plaza, Venice beach, JKwon Plaza
- San Francisco: 3rd & Army, Pier 7
- Prague: Stalin Plaza
- Berlin: Kulturforum, Friedrichshain, Nike SB shelter
- London: Fairfields, House Of Vans
- Melbourne: Lincoln Square
- Copenhagen: Jarmers Plads
- Lyon: Hotel de Ville, Gerland skatepark
If you happen to pass through one of these cities, be sure to bring your board and hit up the local community
Skateboarding city hills
Although this is more common for longboarders and skate cruisers, skateboards are not excluded from bombing hills.
If your city has a hillside area, you can make use of it, if you are comfortable skating at high speeds on descenting surfaces – bombing hills
If you have the right skills, riding down hills on a skateboard allows you to do tricks which are hard to do on a longboard or a cruiser, such as wheelie distances, flip tricks, ollieing over garbage cans, off and on street curbs, manhole covers etc.
You can slow down your descent with powersliding if you are accelerating really fast.
Look for mild hills with good visibility ideally ending with an upward incline with low traffic. Be sure to have spotters to let you know of oncoming cars.
Bombing hills is probably the most dangerous form of skateboarding, only veteran riders should try it.
See also: downhill longboarding
