The "faster-is-slower" effect arises when crowded people push each other to escape through an exit during an emergency situation. As individuals push harder, a statistical slowing down in the evacuation time can be achieved. The slowing down is caused by the presence of small groups of pedestrians (say, a small human cluster) that temporarily block the way out when trying to leave the room. The pressure on the pedestrians belonging to this blocking cluster increases for increasing anxiety levels and/or a larger number of individuals trying to leave the room through the same door. Our investigation shows, however, that very high pressures alter the dynamics in the blocking cluster and, thus, change the statistics of the time delays along the escaping process. A reduction in the long lasting delays can be acknowledged, while the overall evacuation performance improves. We present results on this phenomenon taking place beyond the faster-is-slower regime.

Current regulations demand that at least two exits should be available for a safe evacuation during a panic situation. Although the "faster is slower" effect is expected to take place near the exits, the evacuation time will improve because of the additional exits. However, rooms having contiguous doors not always reduce the leaving time as expected. We investigated the relation between the doors separation and the evacuation performance. We found that there exists a separation distance range that does not really improve the evacuation time, or it can even worsen the process performance. To our knowledge, no attention has been given to this issue in the literature. This work reports how the pedestrians dynamics differ when the separation distance between two exit doors changes and how this affects the overall performance.

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