Strategic elements of route choice

While digital navigation assistants have improved greatly since the mid-1990s, most systems still produce a single route based on extremely limited criteria. Performance and user satisfaction could be improved by better incorporating individual strategies into route-selection algorithms. The concept of strategy as it pertains to navigation is clarified and conceptually tied to attitudes about risk. A questionnaire was developed to measure strategic disposition and attitudes about risk. In addition, three experiments were conducted to determine the role of strategy in search and route-finding tasks. Attitudes about risk were good predictors of strategic search and obstacle avoidance, while environmental spatial ability and strategic disposition were good predictors of symmetric travel behavior. Increased scale of problem spaces resulted in an increased likelihood of strategic search behavior but at a marginally decreasing rate. Taken together, these experiments reveal how foundational issues of strategic disposition and orientation toward risk manifest in wayfinding behavior. Researchers are encouraged to evaluate strategy in light of individual goals, and to consider minimization in the variability of the result as a likely objective, rather than simply analyzing a strategy in terms of its effect on central tendency.