Well Travelled Road Effect

The well travelled road effect is a cognitive bias, coined by Jeffrey Popova-Clark in 2010, in which travellers judge the time a route takes differently depending on how familiar they are with it. A frequently travelled route is judged to take less time than an unfamiliar one, which can lead to errors when comparing a familiar route against an unfamiliar one on the way to a new destination. The effect is strongest for drivers but has also been detected in pedestrians and users of public transport, and although travellers have likely experienced it for centuries, it was first studied scientifically in the 1980s and 1990s, building on the earlier heuristics-and-biases research of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.