Car-Free Cities Are the Future, Biometrics Reveal

[rangerrebew]

Car-Free Cities Are the Future, Biometrics Reveal
Advanced tools for tracking people’s eye movements and facial expressions can be used to design better places

By Justin B. Hollander, Johanna Riddle, Eliandro Tavares, Jenna Van Holten, Jenna Whitney on June 2, 2023
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Until now it has been impossible to peer into the human mind, but new biometric and machine learning tools are changing this. We can now understand how people experience cities, and these insights can provide a roadmap for creating more just, sustainable and healthy places.

Assuming people approve of these technologies surveilling them, researchers like us can collect real-time facial analysis and eye-movement data using webcams. We can then discern subconscious information communicated by people’s faces when they are engaged with different urban scenes. For example, did they smile? What did they look at first? How long were they engaged with what they saw?

Our research group at Tufts University has conducted a number of facial analysis and eye-tracking studies, and sifting through these data we see that people do not like looking at cars. Conventional urban design and planning practice relies on people’s subjective assessments of places they spend time in through surveys or interviews. This new kind of information and other examinations of how people perceive their environments could revolutionize the way we design urban developments because we believe we can better take into account people’s preferences before we start planning how they will use and navigate them.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/car-free-cities-are-the-future-biometrics-reveal/

[Elderberry]

we see that people do not like looking at cars.

People do not like seeing what has happened to the design of cars.  It's not that they don't like cars. Stupid Tufts University research group.

[DefiantMassRINO]

Government Central Urban Planning ... we tried that ... in the Post-War Era it was called urban renewal ... many "blighted" neighborhoods of historical and cultural significance were bulldozed ... many communities were divided or isolated by highway projects ... public housing became warehousing for the poor and ground-zero for the urban dissolution of the American family during the Great Welfare Society of the 1960s and 1970s ... worst of all, it gave us Soviet-style public arhitecture ...

Boston City Hall Plaza, an urban desert:

[Cyber Liberty]

Scientific American strikes again with a bizarre perspective on a study that is not at all related to its headline.

[Smokin Joe]

Well, we know what the people from the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University think.

But this started with an assumption that people liked car-free spaces, used being allowed to go outside during COVID without competing with cars for space as an example, and ran with it, going on about how eyes were drawn to trees and shrubs instead of concrete.

In most urban environments I have seen, trees and shrubs are less common than cars.
People are generally the biggest 'threat', unless the car is moving slowly with the windows down, or you are crossing the street.

Maybe folks around there are driving vehicles that all look the same and don't command any attention, either.