Parking and the visual perception of space

Abstract

Using measured data we demonstrate that there is an amazing correspondence among the statistical properties of spacings between parked cars and the distances between birds perching on a power line. We show that this observation is easily explained by the fact that birds and human use the same mechanism of distance estimation. We give a simple mathematical model of this phenomenon and prove its validity using measured data.

References in corpus (4)

• Interaction Ruling Animal Collective Behaviour Depends on Topological rather than Metric Distance: Evidence from a Field Study
• Random Sequential Adsorption: From Continuum to Lattice and Pre-Patterned Substrates
• Inter-vehicle gap statistics on signal-controlled crossroads
• Modeling Spacing Distribution of Queuing Vehicles in Front of a Signalized Junction Using Random-Matrix Theory

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Coulomb and Riesz gases: The known and the unknown
• Gaussian Determinantal Processes: a new model for directionality in data
• Territorial behaviour of buzzards versus random matrix spacing distributions
• The Dyson and Coulomb games
• Birds on a Wire
• Relaxation of saturated random sequential adsorption packings of discorectangles aligned on a line
• Interactions Between Different Birds of Prey as a Random Point Process
• Asymmetry in repeated isotropic rotations