Classical urban planners and road builders make assumptions about human behavior which have not been tested for the very simple reason that people working in these fields have technical backgrounds. There are density model data pertaining to transit stops indicating that whereas a value of 300 meters distance between transit stops is acceptable in the town center, in suburbs as much as 800 meters is acceptable. However, these data do not stand up to critical examination. The density model data would suggest that if the people in the center city were to change places with the people in suburbs, behavior (and attitudes) would change correspondingly. This suggestion is in error. The primary technical planning error is based on the assumption that objectively measureable data can be processed objectively by human beings. According to this assumption, time and distance are accurately experienced by human beings in the same way as they are measured by a watch or measuring tape. This is very doubtful. Not even organisms as simple as insects "work" in this way, as Frisch showed in his works on the behavior of bees. 1 To bees, distances are interpreted as different degrees of resistance. For example, Frisch demonstrated that bees communicate walking distances of 3-4 meters as equivalent to flying distances of 60-80 meters. The assumption is made that if people in the suburbs were exchanged for people in the center city, behavior would change as place of residence changes. This assumption is in error. This information, which has been available for some 50 years, would seem to indicate that even more complicated organisms such as human beings perceive quantities that appear easy to measure physically - such as time or distance - not in a physical but in a subjective way. If so, ignoring this information may give rise to serious mistakes in our planning. (Author/publisher)
Abstract