Recently I've been sitting down and designing fingerboard parks. I'm doing this just with pencil and paper and I'm simply just drawing out the parks and imagining if they would be fun or not to skate.
While doing this I noticed something about stairs in fingerboard parks. Although stairs look wicked awesome and are a blast to do tricks down I believe that they impose limitations on the park and make the park itself less useful.
So I then ask the question...
Which is better to have in your park, a stair set or a ramp?
To try and answer this I'm comparing the most simple stair set and the most simple bank ramp and nothing else. Now, lets see what these two obstacles have to offer.
Stair Set* Trick down them
* Possibly trick up them (depending on their size and height)
* Possibly ride down them, but its bumpy
* Trick then stall on one of the stairs and trick out
Now lets look at the ramp
Basic Ramp* Trick down it
* Trick up it
* Ride down and up it
* Ride up it and trick and land on it and roll down it
* Use it as a kickers and launch off of it
* Do a trick from before the ramp and land it on the transition and go down it
As you can see. It seems as if stair sets have limited functionality when compared to normal ramps. It seems like you can simply do more things with a regular ramp than you can a stair set.
So maybe by putting ramps instead of stairs in your park you could possibly increase the usability of your park and possibly increase the fun factor too simply because you can do more with ramps than stairs and thus get more out of your park.
Stair sets seem to sometimes break the flow of the park because you can't just roll up them like ramps. Some stairs you can ollie onto which is bearable, but when the stair set gets bigger and bigger it becomes harder and harder to ollie up it thus reducing flow in a park.
I did find that there is a way to have stairs though and not break the flow of your park. This can be done in certain places and its accomplished by a stair and ramp combination. The best of both worlds!
Here in the picture below you can see this stair and ramp combination. In this situation you can get all of the benefits of the stairs and ramp without the stairs breaking the flow of the park.
So if you really want to have some stairs then use a combo like this one an order to not loose any functionality in your park.
