A UK academic claims to know why our journeys seem longer every day. Dick Ahlstrom reports
Have you ever noticed how driving to a destination usually seems shorter than the drive back? A lecturer from the University of Manchester's Architectural Research Centre believes he can explain why.
The same research by Dr Andrew Crompton might also explain why your daily commute seems to be getting longer by the day, even it you keep arriving at the same time. He will publish his findings this month in the journal Environment and Behaviour.
It all has to do with the way our brains react to objects on the route as a function of time, says Crompton, a researcher at Umarc. The more often we have to cover the same ground, the more familiar it gets and the longer it seems to become, his research indicates. He conducted a series of tests using 140 students who were asked to walk for a distance along the busy Oxford Road in Manchester. These were pedestrian tests, but he believes that the same would hold true while driving.
He used a mix of first, second and third-year students for these tests, in which they were asked to walk along the route, guessing distances as they went until reaching a terminal destination.
Sure enough, the more familiar the student was with the route, the longer he or she thought it was. Although only covering a mile, first-year students estimated the distance to be 1.24 miles. Second years who had traversed Oxford Road many more times up until the tests, estimated the mile at 1.33 miles on average. The jaded third-year students, real veterans on the route, thought they had walked about 1.45 miles.
These results match a theory that holds that distances seem to elongate in our minds because we notice more and more details about a route the more often we traverse it.
The theory, the "feature-accumulation hypothesis" is related to the quantity of information stored about the route, says Crompton. His experiments were designed "to test this hypothesis and to see if cities really do get bigger the longer we know them", he writes in Environment and Behaviour.
The results showed that distance estimates increase over time, but they also highlighted another finding - journeys into town always seemed shorter than equal journeys away from the city centre.
These are not chance findings and are linked to the way that our brains process spatial and distance information. We are "hard wired" to handle this information, he told The Irish Times. "It is embedded in our perceptual apparatus to detect distance."
He believes that these findings would transfer directly to a driving environment, although "we haven't tested it", he added.
"The difficulty with doing it is you know how far you have driven using the odometer. It is a much harder thing to test although I would expect the theory to carry over to driving."