Comparing the costs of pedestrian wayfinding heuristics across different urban network morphologies. GeoComputation 2019

During wayfinding, pedestrians do not always choose the shortest available route. Instead, route choices are guided by several well-known wayfinding strategies or heuristics. These heuristics minimize cognitive effort and usually lead to satisfactory route choices. The length of the route obtained from applying a wayfinding heuristic is dependent on the spatial arrangement or morphology of the urban pedestrian network. This study evaluates the cost of four popular wayfinding heuristics across nine different urban network morphologies. It observes that the cost of these wayfinding heuristics vary significantly and individually differently with morphology, supporting the assumption that people choose heuristics by environment.