"How your speed and the doubled scan refresh rate affects how many Pokemon you encounter. The change is trivial for walkers, small for cyclists, and huge for people in cars."

#PokemonGO: Niantic recently changed the game to update the pokemon scans once every ten seconds instead of once every five seconds. This change means you will see less area scanned while you move, but speed has a huge impact on how much less it really is.Consider travelling at 13.4 mph (6 m/s, over the 5.5 m/s speed referenced in a popular but completely incorrect post on /r/pokemongo complaining about the change). If scanning were perfect and had no time gaps, you would sweep a rectangle with an area of 4,800 m2 over the course of 10 seconds of movement. With 5 seconds between scans, the circles cover 4,685 m2, which is 97.6% of the perfect area. With 10 seconds between scans, your scan circles cover 4,301 m2, which is 89.6% of the perfect area. Comparing between the two rates, at 13.4 mph, you cover 92% as much area with 10-second scans as you do with 5-second scans.Here is an image showing the difference between 10-second scans and 5-second scans at 13.4 mph. The slivers of green are missed by both sets of scans. The spots of red are the only areas that used to be hit by 5-second scans that are now missed by 10-second scans.Here is a graph showing how coverage compares at different speeds. The chart shows how much area 10-second scans cover as a fraction of 5-second scans. At 0 mph, you cover the exact same area regardless of time, so 10-second scans cover 100% as much as 5-second scans. It isn't until you get up to roughly 15 mph that 10-second scans cover 10% less area than scanning every 5 seconds. And at 35 mph or faster, you are going fast enough that 5-second scans will not overlap each other at all (and obviously slower scans won't overlap either), so scanning half as often gets you exactly half the coverage. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2aj8Mr7