Archive for January 14th, 2009

Via David Hembrow, I love these Dutch traffic education cards, each of which, as Hembrow translates, presents a reason kids might give to try to cadge a lift from their parents (and why they shouldn’t):

“1. The car is much quicker (by design in this country, cycling within town is generally quicker than driving).
2. My bag is much too heavy.
3. It’s too far (”Dad, do you know how far that walk is ? It’s 50000 centimetres!”)
4. It’s raining (”I just can’t wear this rain jacket”).”

Contrast this to the U.S., where many schools will not discharge a kid without a parent/driver there to pick them up.

It’s a U.K. spot, circa 1976, but the singers sound very American, as funky but perhaps less psychedelic than the Kroft Supershow…

Yesterday morning found me at a TRB panel, “Building the 21st Century Transportation System,” moderated by NYC’s own Janette Sadik-Khan. There were a number of interesting details offered — e.g., that J.S.K. had played rugby at Occidental College (she was abroad the year Barack Obama was there) a good skill set I think for navigating Gotham politics; or that Portlanders drive 4 fewer miles per day than other places in the U.S.; or that Seattle is high on the safety benefits of “advanced stop bars” — but one small anecdote that caught my attention in particular was offered by Fred Hansen, of Portland’s Tri-Met.

Talking about the city’s “Transit Tracker” program, which allows people to get real-time info on bus arrivals via their cell phones, Hansen mentioned a study that had been done in the U.K. of a similar program. What was noteworthy was that people using the service felt that the bus service itself had improved, that more buses were running, that they were running closer to schedule, even though none of this was empirically true.

I have a particular interest in the fluid nature of time, and the way travel, queuing, and even routing can play additive and subtractive games with this. Paco Underhill, for example, notes that people who wait in airport lines overestimate the time they waited by some 50 percent. I’ve also seen it noted that a train trip with a transfer feels longer to people than it really is, that people overestimate the time it will take to walk somewhere and underestimate the time it will take to drive somewhere. Of course, one of the masters of managing time is Disney, with its posted wait times (just posting the time makes it feel shorter for people) at queues, wait times which are then inflated — so the payoff at the end is even better: That wasn’t long at all!

The lesson here, I suppose, is that perception can be just as important as reality in crafting the “customer experience,” a lesson that applies as much to public transit as it does to the Magic Kingdom.

Via John Adams:

“John Adams and (even older – positively venerable) Mayer Hillman are looking for a younger enthusiast to carry on a research project that Mayer and Anne Whalley began at the Policy Studies Institute. In 1971, they conducted a survey of English children’s independent mobility – how they got to school, visited friends and so on, whether they were allowed to get about and use public transport on their own and, if they owned a bicycle, to ride it on public roads, and how they spent the weekend previous to the survey. Parents also were involved by completing a questionnaire about the age up to which they imposed personal mobility restrictions on their children, and the reasons for doing so.

These surveys were repeated in the same schools in 1990 (published as One False Move … and available online at http://john-adams.co.uk/books/). This follow-up study disclosed a dramatic loss of children’s independence over the previous 19 years. For instance, in 1971, 80% of 7 and 8-year old children got to school unaccompanied by an adult but by 1990 this proportion had fallen to 9%. With the collaboration of John Whitelegg, then at the Wuppertal Institute, matching surveys to provide a cultural comparison were conducted in West Germany. This revealed that, compared with the English, children there enjoyed a significantly higher level of independence.

Now, close on 20 years later, we think it would be instructive to conduct the surveys again to produce a 40-year review and to extend the comparison to other European countries to widen understanding of the influence of culture. The study would be an opportunity to chronicle the changes in children’s independent mobility and the possible relationship this has had with their physical and emotional development. It would also help to explain the social significance of children’s loss of what could be described as a right and enable lessons to be learned from wider international comparisons with the experience, behaviour and attitudes of children and parents in other countries…

…Anyone tempted, please contact Mayer in the first instance at mayer.hillman@blueyonder.co.uk.”