There seems to be an over-focus in the article on how cognitive cost heuristic used to evaluate trajectories explain why humans choose certain paths. In fact a lot of things go into planning a walk, including at times not planning at all, but walking as the spirit guides you as it were.<p>For example, on the tendency for people to take longer, non-optimal paths for longer walks, the article states...<p><i>The tendency to deviate from the shortest path increases with distance between the origin and destination, which could be due to the increasing complexity of evaluating relatively longer paths, in line with the approximate rationality principle.</i><p>What it seems to assume is that people completely pre-plan their walk, or rather attempt to. And that optimizing the path for shortness is the top priority of the walker. But if they simply have an agenda to get from point A to point B, many things can influence the path they choose.<p>In real life, one may vaguely plan a walk, then at key moments make making various path decisions. And those decisions aren't necessarily about optimizing the path. One might for example not take a street because of construction or some obstruction on the sidewalk, and just continue on to the next path.<p>And sometimes people may choose a path that goes by a park, or a particularly interesting building, or favorite store, or out of curiosity to know what is down a perhaps unfamiliar street, or even to NOT take an unfamiliar street but to take one they are familiar with.<p>I'd also add that OSM is not always a good reference for planning walks. I just finished walking every street in my city (done with CityStrides website, 694 streets, around 380 miles) this year, and planning optimal walk routes really wasn't always efficient via mapping data. For example, OSM and such can't take into account simple shortcuts like crossing a railroad track or park to reach another street. Early on I hand-planned each walk to optimize street coverage, but towards the end just started walking with only a general plan in mind for the day's walk.
PDF at <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.07104" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.07104</a> (<a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.07104" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.07104</a>)