'Plan ahead' is also a nice example of a pleonasm.

And I've lost count of how many times I've found this technique useful to draw a bike.

This idea was shared with me from this Instagram account.

Plan ahead

Marchetti's constant is the idea that people across history budget, on average, about an hour a day for travelling. Originally observed by Yacov Zahavi, it came from the observation that even as our means of transport sped up, instead of travelling less each day, we would just travel further. As in the sketch, this leads to a conclusion that the size of our cities increases partly according to how efficiently we can travel in and out—they generally increase to a size that maintains about an hour round-trip journey.

Cesare Marchetti observed that Greek villages and ancient walking cities, for example, as marked by ancient city walls, tend to share a radius of about 2.5km. Walking at a typical 5km/hr makes a one-hour round-trip journey. He also pointed out that: “Even people in prison for a life sentence, having nothing to do and nowhere to go, walk around for one hour a day, in the open.”

Unfortunately, if you live in London, the average round-trip seems to be an exception of 1h30.

This is also known as the constant travel time budget hypothesis.

Isochrones. It might be interesting to look at these according to transport method

Our senses are built to take in information at human pace

Image adapted from: Marchetti, C., 1994: Anthropological Invariants in Travel Behavior, Technological Forecasting and Social Change , 47 :75–88, Internal Publication, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.

Marchetti’s constant

I think it would be interesting if we could see the real shape of your favourite crossing marked on the road. It’d probably help more people cross and traffic get stopped less. And, hopefully, no casualties.

The real shape of a crossing

James Clear (Jamesclear.com) has a host of ways to help make sure you focus on the importants like starting every day with the most important activities, and ruthless focus.

I spent a year organising my to-do list in these boxes and it was striking just how long the important not urgents keep getting moved on to the next list. Part of the secret there is to break them down to startable tasks rather than big projects. FWIW I don’t actually recommend the really concrete action of organising the to-do list in the quadrants. More being cognizant of what type each task is. But it may help for a while.

The importance/urgency matrix

Desire paths: created by desire and use. Sometimes I find myself walking on the traces of one as a statement that ‘there ought to be a path here’ - voting with my feet.

There’s the classic, perhaps apocryphal, story of the architect who didn’t build any paths on a campus until people had worn them in, showing where the paths should be.

The phenomena has found use in technology with the phrase 'pave the cowpaths’.

One emergent behaviour-related concept arising from architecture and planning which has also found application in human-computer interaction is the idea of desire lines, desire paths or cowpaths. The usual current use of the term (often attributed, although apparently in error, to Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1964)) is to describe paths worn by pedestrians across spaces such as parks, between buildings or to avoid obstacles—“the foot-worn paths that sometimes appear in a landscape over time” (Mathes, 2004) and which become self-reinforcing as subsequent generations of pedestrians follow what becomes an obvious path. Throgmorton & Eckstein (2000) also discuss Chicago transportation engineers’ use of ‘desire lines’ to describe maps of straight-line origin-to-destination journeys across the city, in the process revealing assumptions about the public’s ‘desire’ to undertake these journeys. In either sense, desire lines (along with use-marks (Burns, 2007)) could perhaps, using economic terminology, be seen as a form of revealed user preference (Beshears et al, 2008) or at least revealed choice, with a substantial normative quality.

Architecture, urbanism, design and behaviour: a brief review, Dan Lockton, Sep 2011

Or see this very concrete example from UC Berkeley at peterme.com.

Desire path

Sure the big city is worse than the country. But the reality is back streets in a big city are significantly better than the busy streets in a big city, and air pollution changes massively even for small children down at the height of exhausts versus adults standing higher.

So if you’re not about to move to the country you could help yourself a lot nonetheless by taking the back streets (I read this premise in Focus magazine, but can’t find an online link to reference).

Pollution is highly localized: take the back streets

Hofstadter's Law is “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you account for Hofstadter’s Law.”

Hofstadter's Law is one of my favourites, and I share it time and time again.

We are bad at estimating. We don't allow for the unexpected. We don't know the unknown unknowns. We are overly optimistic. We suffer from recency bias. Generally, we struggle with big, complex things.

In the law's recursion, it's a little like this guidance from Clean Code:

“The first rule of functions is that they should be small. The second rule of functions is that they should be smaller than that.”—Clean Code

Or omit unnecessary words from Steve Krug

From Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979)

Hofstadter’s Law

California weather = predictable. British weather = unpredictable.

Planning sketches