Need Directions? Might Not Want To Ask a Transit Rider 97
Daniel_Stuckey writes "According to new research, drivers, walkers, and bicyclists will generally provide us with more useful directions than transit riders. Published in Urban Planning, 'Going Mental' shows that cognitively active travelers, regardless of commute by foot or car, tend to trump cognitively passive travelers (those who frequent public buses and trains), in perceiving distance. Questioning cognitively active, passive, and mixed travelers about distances from a survey site to LA's city hall, the research demonstrated that the passive bus and subway riders have less of a grip on distance. Actively cognitive travelers, according to the results, were more likely to integrate street names in their directions, and also exhibited a sharper understanding of distances."
Expert Knowledge (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it depends what king of trip planning you are looking for. I'm betting that if you want TRANSIT directions from A to B, asking a transit user is better. If you are seeking road directions, then of course you want to ask a road user (eg, a car driver)
Re:Of course people who navigate... (Score:4, Insightful)
or even better, how to get from point a to b when it requires 3 lines and two transfers. mixing bus and rail.
Re:Of course people who navigate... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course people who navigate...are better at locating than people who are passengers.
It might not be so simple as that: people who travel by different means are travelling a different set of routes:
If you embark on a mass transit system you are effectively traversing a graph with a bunch of nodes that are (as a factor of time of day/day of week, rather than distance) more or less frequently linked to one another. When the link is available, taking it will get you to the next node in an amount of time only very weakly correlated with distance (the bigger variable usually being the number of stops made, the closest equivalent to 'traffic' and the biggest drag on theoretical maximum speed).
Similarly, pedestrians are likely acutely aware of distance, because they have to walk it and because they move slowly; but are probably a poor source of information on things like one-way streets, traffic signals, etc. because they move more or less freely except at road crossings.
Why would it even be expected that people using different types of transportation would treat the same information as salient? In other news, people who fly exhibit a poor understanding of hiking conditions...