If you're in a hurry, dodge thetravelator

摘要

Your flight leaves in 10 minutes and you've only just made it through security. As you run to your gate you come to a corridor with a moving walkway. Should you hop on?rnMaybe not. People on travelators actually tend to slow their pace, making time-savings minimal, and a new study helps to explain why.rnManoj Srinivasan, a locomotion researcher at Princeton University, created two mathematical models of how people travel on such walkways (Chaos, DOI: 10.1063/1.3141428). In the first, he assumed people walk in a way that minimises the energy they expend, a standard theory in locomotion research. In the second, he assumed people walk in a way that best makes sense of the signals relayed from their eyes and legs.