Transportation
Do Places Seem Farther Away When You Have to Walk to Get There?
Turns out pedestrians who live in cities consistently over-estimate the amount of time it takes to walk somewhere. Why this matters to density.
Think, for a second: How long would it take you to walk to the coffee shop closest to your home? Less than five minutes? More like 10, 20, 30?
When Kevin Krizek, a planning and civil engineering professor at the University of Colorado, and his colleagues asked hundreds of people living in and around Minneapolis, Minnesota, to estimate the time it would take them to reach destinations like this—the closest coffee shop, convenience store, laundromat, bank, pharmacy, hardware store, bus stop, library, post office, book store and park— on foot, only about a third got the answers right.