Effect of simplicity and attractiveness on route selection for different journey types

This study investigated the effects of six attributes, associated with simplicity or attractiveness, on route preference for three pedestrian journey types (everyday, leisure and tourist). Using stated choice preference experiments with computer generated scenes, participants were asked to choose one of a pair of routes showing either two levels of the same attribute (experiment 1) or different attributes (experiment 2). Contrary to predictions, vegetation was the most influential for both everyday and leisure journeys, and land use ranked much lower than expected in both cases. Turns ranked higher than decision points for everyday journeys as predicted, but the positions of both were lowered by initially unranked attributes. As anticipated, points of interest were most important for tourist trips, with the initially unranked attributes having less influence. This is the first time so many attributes have been compared directly, providing new information about the importance of the attributes for different journeys. © 2014 Springer International Publishing

Network and Psychological Effects in Urban Movement

Correlations are regularly found in space syntax studies between graph-based configurational measures of street networks, represented as lines, and observed movement patterns. This suggests that topological and geometric complexity are critically involved in how people navigate urban grids. This has caused difficulties with orthodox urban modelling, since it has always been assumed that insofar as spatial factors play a role in navigation, it will be on the basis of metric distance. In spite of much experimental evidence from cognitive science that geometric and topological factors are involved in navigation, and that metric distance is unlikely to be the best criterion for navigational choices, the matter has not been convincingly resolved since no method has existed for extracting cognitive information from aggregate flows. Within the space syntax literature it has also remained unclear how far the correlations that are found with syntactic variables at the level of aggregate flows are due to cognitive factors operating at the level of individual movers, or they are simply mathematically probable network effects, that is emergent statistical effects from the structure of line networks, independent of the psychology of navigational choices. Here we suggest how both problems can be resolved, by showing three things: first, how cognitive inferences can be made from aggregate urban flow data and distinguished from network effects; second by showing that urban movement, both vehicular and pedestrian, are shaped far more by the geometrical and topological properties of the grid than by its metric properties; and third by demonstrating that the influence of these factors on movement is a cognitive, not network, effect

Path selection and route preference in human navigation: A progress report

Two critical characteristics of human wayfinding are destination choice and path selection. Traditionally, the path selection problem has been ignored or assumed to be the result of minimizing procedures such as selecting the shortest path, the quickest path or the least costly path. In this paper I draw on existing literature from cognitive mapping and cognitive distance, to define possible route selection criteria other than these traditional ones. Experiments with route selection on maps and in the field are then described and analyzed to determine which criteria appear to be used as the environment changes and as one increases the number of nodes along a path (i.e., as trip chaining replaces a simple Origin-Destination (O-D) pairing

Aktuelle Befunde des IÖR-Monitors zur Flächenneuinanspruchnahme in Deutschland

Der Monitor der Siedlungs- und Freiraumentwicklung (IÖR-Monitor) stellt seit 2008 jährlich bundesweite Indikatoren zur quantitativen und qualitativen Charakterisierung der Flächennutzungsstruktur bereit. Die Indikatoren können zur Bewertung der Erreichung von Nachhaltigkeitszielen herangezogen werden. Von besonderer Bedeutung sind dabei Indikatoren mit Bezug zur Flächennutzung, die in der Nationalen Nachhaltigkeitsstrategie benannt und mit Zielvorgaben hinsichtlich einer nachhaltigen Entwicklung untersetzt werden. Dazu gehören die Flächenneuinanspruchnahme für Siedlung und Verkehr, welche in diesem Beitrag mit Messwerten und Zeitreihen aus dem IÖR-Monitor hinterlegt und analysiert wird

Computational Structure in Three-Valued Nearness Relations

The development of cognitively plausible models of human spatial reasoning may ultimately result in computational systems that are better equipped to meet human needs. This paper explores how human subjects perceive the qualitative spatial relation nearness within an environmental space. Based on experimental data, a three-valued nearness relation is analysed in two stages. First, the results are analysed with special reference to the existence of subsets of candidate landmark places, from which nearness relations between other places may be partially inferred. Second, the desirable properties of such landmark sets are considered and some of their formal properties are presented. These properties are then considered in the light of the data furnished by the experiment. The paper concludes with a discussion of the significance of the analyses and the scope for further work in this area