Need Directions? Might Not Want To Ask a Transit Rider

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."

Comments

Of course people who navigate...

[DontScotty]

Of course people who navigate...are better at locating than people who are passengers.

This article does not need Slashdoted,
 
it needs a quick trip to dev null...
 
(provided someone can give it directions)

Re:Of course people who navigate...

[Eunuchswear]

The article says nothing about thinking for yourself. It talks about giving directions.

Now re-run the test asking car and bicycle drivers what metro line or bus route you should take, .and how long it'll take to get there. (Who cares what the distance is - it's time that counts).

Re:Of course people who navigate...

[wvmarle]

I am a frequent public transport user. I don't even have a car.

Unless on a familiar route, I wouldn't be able to answer such a question. Instead I have an app for that. Hong Kong has over 500 bus routes, about 300 green minibus routes, numerous red minibus routes (of which no route information is available other than on their stops, if they even have formal stops), non-franchised buses, and on top of that the trains, trams, light rail and ferries.

Quite often to get home from an unfamiliar place I just find a bus stop, see which buses run there and where they go (looking for major interchanges on the route, e.g. "I need a cross-harbour route - any of the about 80 such routes will do"), and go from there. Works quite well.

Re:Of course people who navigate...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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...

Re:Of course people who navigate...

[nospam007]

"Now re-run the test asking car and bicycle drivers what metro line or bus route you should take, .and how long it'll take to get there. (Who cares what the distance is - it's time that counts)."

I don't understand the article at all. This is news for nerds, who are in the majority male.

And everybody knows that males don't ask for directions.

THIS JUST IN:

[toygeek]

Navigators know more about Navigation than People who don't Navigate

More at.... wait no, that's it.

This news brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department Department.

Re:THIS JUST IN:

[abies]

In other news:
Musicians can recognize pitch of the sound better than deaf people.
Special force soldiers fare better in the fight ring than housewifes.
Women are better at bearing babies than men.
Slashdot readers are better at detecting duplicate stories than slashdot editors.
Urban Planners are better at stating the obvious than me...