Paceometer

We’ve all seen a vehicle speedometer, scaled in km/h or mph like this:

A paceometer is made by adding another scale, as with the outer scale of minutes per 10 miles below (image source here):

Fitness apps on smartphones can display distance traveled, travel time, and pace. In the article Pace yourself: Improving time-saving judgments when increasing activity speed, the authors conclude:

In this paper, we tried to highlight a general cognitive phenomenon in which people misestimate time-savings when increasing speed and suggested that this bias is due to the commonly used speed measures that extenuate people’s inability to recognize the curvilinear relationship between these speed measures and the reduction of activity time. We offer a simple remedy for this bias: converting speed values to pace data, which simplifies the cognitive task of judging time-savings because the data conforms to people’s lay perceptions. We believe that this simple solution can be applied to other contexts in which individuals’ judgments might be biased.

Here’s a table to convert miles per hour to minutes per 10 miles, or kilometers per hour to minutes per 10 kilometers – note it’s the same conversion, relatively speaking: