Something slowing you down? (Image: Image Source / Rex Features)

YOUR flight leaves in 10 minutes and you’ve only just made it through security. As you run to your gate you come to a corridor with a moving walkway. Should you hop on?

Maybe not. People on travelators actually tend to slow their pace, making time-savings minimal, and a new study helps to explain why.

Manoj Srinivasan, a locomotion researcher at Princeton University, created two mathematical models of how people travel on such walkways (Chaos, DOI: 10.1063/1.3141428). In the first, he assumed people walk in a way that minimises …