Do modes of transportation and GPS affect cognitive maps of Londoners?

Legibility has long been recognized as an important factor in creating a good image of a city in individuals’ minds. This image is perceived to assist people in understanding the city, finding their way, and recalling the city. The quality of the image affects individuals’ abilities in way-finding. This is especially important for cosmopolitan and global cities such as London in order to preserve resources and time, manage travel costs, limit pollution (air or noise) and enhance these cities as places to live, work and visit. This research examines the cognitive maps of London drawn by a sample of its residents to discover how different modes of transportation and GPS usage could affect individuals’ urban images. Such research is useful for town planners, local government departments, and urban and transport planners because of the way it considers the legibility of London as and provides a tool to study individuals’ urban images. 101 participants were recruited with at least a two-year residency from both genders (38.6% females and 61.4% males) with the average age of 33.88 and S.D.=10.63. The results suggest car use has a positive correlation with seeing London in city scale and GPS usage has a negative correlation. Whilst recent studies have shown that there are differences between active travel modes (e.g., walking, bicycle riding or driving a car) and passive modes (e.g., as a passenger taking a bus, train or taxi), this study indicates that GPS usage also influences cognitive maps, with a negative correlation found between GPS usage and drawing maps on a city scale. Other significant associations were found for the car drivers with a positive relation with the number of roads mentioned on the maps, seeing London in city scale and having a two-dimensional façade image of the city in mind.