Comments on: All distances on London pedestrian signs to be shown in “minutes”

By: Martin Vlietstra

Martin Vlietstra — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 13:24:02 +0000

I saw a map today erected by the London Borough of Islington. It showed a five-minute circle centred on “You are here”, but has a scale showing metres, feet and a “five minute walk”. They appear to work on a distance of about 375 m in five minutes

By: John Frewen-Lord

John Frewen-Lord — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:56:23 +0000

I am not going to suggest that either distance or time is better (and why not give both?). But I do notice that in major airports (Heathrow, Schipol, Toronto Pearson, etc), walking distances to gates are shown primarily as time (e.g. gates E20-E32, 10 min), which of course does take into account the fact that the route is invariably not a straight line (but must also ignore moving walkways?!). (Pearson in some places also gives the distance in meters.)

By: Dave Brown

Dave Brown — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 21:04:36 +0000

It occurs to me that minutes at a given speed is not a very helpful way to measure a distance. It makes is difficult to work out the actual distance in distance units, should you wish to do so. Whatever system you use, metric or imperial, speed is always quoted per hour or per second. So to work out distance travelled in 1 minute will require either multiplication or division by 60.

By: Martin Vlietstra

Martin Vlietstra — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 06:07:03 +0000

It appears that they are working on the principal that 67 m (as the crow flies) can be covered in one minute.

By: Anton Commandeur

Anton Commandeur — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 15:15:33 +0000

I have got some old Dutch maps of The Netherlands from about 1870. Distances are given in “uuren gaans” which translates more or less to “hours to travel”. One uuren gaans corresponded to about 5 kilometres. It seems that the uuren gaans was more common than the mile.

So in that respect London follows an old tradition.

By: philH

philH — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 09:52:13 +0000

In answer to Weeble’s point about educating and changing behaviour. Providing inaccurate and misleading information is an odd way to educate people.
It would be much easier to associate distance with walking times if we adopted a single system of measurement that everyone can understand and use. The campaign to complete metrication would ultimately address this business of walking times and many other issues related to measurement.
Also the written word “minute” is language dependant wheras the metre or kilometre are not when the ‘m’ and ‘km’ symbols are used.

By: Martin Vlietstra

Martin Vlietstra — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 09:29:09 +0000

One of the tests in the Boy Scouts was to estimate distances. It was this which led me to write an wrtilce for this blog about a year ago on just that topic. See http://www.metricviews.org.uk/2007/04/08/how-many-visualise-km/#more-52.

By: Tristan McLeay

Tristan McLeay — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 01:30:24 +0000

I have considered the matter before and have concluded that pedestrians and cyclists should be given distances in metres or kilometres, not time. The problem is pedestrians and cyclists just move at such different speeds that five minutes for one person is two for another and ten for a third. Additionally by using time it completely separates pedestrians and cyclists who, while they should not use the same parts of the road way, still have many of the same needs. Metres and kilometres are used the whole world around and most people will have some idea of how long it’ll take to walk five hundred metres — or they would, if signage was consistently provided in metres and kilometres.

By: Dave Brown

Dave Brown — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:47:17 +0000

“Distance Information. Minutes, miles, metres or yards? Across the systems there are inconsistencies which can be confusing for a pedestrian”?
Yes it’s confusing for everyone, not just pedestrians. That’s why we started the metrication programme back in the 1960s. If the government actually got on and completed that programme then the confusion would be sorted out overnight.

It’s rather ironic that this campaign is called “legible London”. Using time units to measure distance has made their maps totally illegible.

By: Weeble

Weeble — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:22:56 +0000

I universally support the metric system over the imperial system, but I think you are living in an ivory tower on this one. Yes, in a theoretically ideal world where everyone is great at mental arithmetic and familiar with units of distance at a wide variety of scales, marking the signs with units of distance would probably make sense. But as the report describes, people care about how long a journey will take, not how far it is, and they are very poor judges of “how far is far”. This scheme seeks to educate people that walking is a viable choice where they would not otherwise have realised it. It’s not just about providing information, but about changing behaviour. “5 minutes walk” may not give an accurate time for how long it will take a given person to walk, but it gives a good rough idea. For many people, “350metres” (or “1000ft”, etc.) may not give them any idea at all how long it would take to walk.

Another thought that occurs to me is that it doesn’t take the same amount of time to walk 100m on the flat as it does 100m up a hill. If they have actually calculated the times by measurement of average time for a number of people actually walking the distances, they may be more indicative than a distance alone. Of course, I have no idea if they actually did this.