Science News

By studying how pedestrians behave in crowds, European scientists are learning surprising things about human behavior. Westerners, for example, will usually step to the right to avoid an oncoming pedestrian. Individuals in Asia, however, tend to step to the left. Another tendency scientists have noticed is that clusters of three and four people naturally organize themselves into concave 'V' and 'U' shapes, with middle members falling back slightly. The formation makes it easier for individuals to talk with each other.

The distance between two cities is far less important than the population size in the area surrounding them. The team has now created a model that takes human motives into account rather than simply assuming that a larger city attracts commuters. They then tested their “radiation model” on five types of mobility studies and compared the results to existing data. In each case, the radiation model’s predictions were far more accurate than the gravity model’s, which are sometimes off by an order of magnitude.

Five years after São Paulo, Brazil, began fighting visual pollution by banning billboard, poster and bus advertisements, people report being happier with their city and business leaders have become more forward thinking. The ban was the result of the 'Clean City Law' of 2006 which required the removal of tens of thousands of unregulated advertisements. "Anna Freitag, the marketing manager for Hewlett-Packard Brazil, said her company had never considered how inefficient billboards and the like were until they were illegal."