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Pedestrian dynamics are affected by several factors including pedestrian compositions. In this article, we examine the movement characteristics of Palestinian pedestrians using the fundamental diagram for single-file movement experiments conducted with an emphasis on gender compositions. Our findings show that the mean velocity of exclusively male pedestrians is approximately the same as exclusively female pedestrians. For instance, when the number of pedestrians is 20, the velocities for male and female are 0.72 ± 0.10 ms −1 and 0.71 ± 0.11 ms −1 , respectively, whereas their velocity decreases gradually if they walk in mixed groups with an average velocity of 0.61 ± 0.11 ms −1. We also compare our findings with other culture-based experiments to demonstrate that pedestrian cultures have an effect on their movement characteristics. Moreover, we demonstrate that age is another factor that affects pedestrians' movement. A comparative analysis is performed between Palestinian and Chinese experiments for this purpose. Our results confirm that for relatively high densities older Chinese pedestrians walk faster than young Palestinians in groups of mixed gender. INDEX TERMS Comparative analysis, fundamental diagram, gender differences, pedestrian dynamics, single-file movement.

Demographics of individuals could largely influence their behaviors and interactions with surrounding pedestrians. This study investigates the influence of pedestrians’ gender on microscopic walking dynamics of single-file movements using the trajectory data collected from a controlled experiment conducted under different density levels. Instantaneous acceleration (with a time lag that varied from 0.12 s to 0.68 s) versus relative speed between the subject pedestrian and the pedestrian in front of him/her plots displayed significant correlations, which is analogous to the car following behavior, indicating that the relative speed is a key determinant of pedestrians’ acceleration behavior. Time-delayed instantaneous accelerations and decelerations of pedestrians were modeled as functions of relative speed and spacing that are used in microscopic behavior models and gender using multiple linear regression. The outcomes revealed that in addition to relative speed, gender has a significant influence on instantaneous acceleration and deceleration for all density levels. Spacing displayed significant influence on acceleration and deceleration only for several density levels, and that influence was not as strong as relative speed. Males were likely to accelerate more and decelerate more compared to females for all density levels. The findings of this study provide important insights into gender dependence on microscopic walking dynamics. Furthermore, the results emphasize the importance of considering gender influence in microscopic behavior models.

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Identifying the factors that control the dynamics of pedestrians is a crucial step towards modeling and building various pedestrian-oriented simulation systems. In this article, we empirically explore the influential factors that control the single-file movement of pedestrians and their impact. Our goal in this context is to apply feed-forward neural networks to predict and understand the individual speeds for different densities of pedestrians. With artificial neural networks, we can approximate the fitting function that describes pedestrians’ movement without having modeling bias. Our analysis is focused on the distances and range of interactions across neighboring pedestrians. As indicated by previous research, we find that the speed of pedestrians depends on the distance to the predecessor. Yet, in contrast to classical purely anisotropic approaches—which are based on vision fields and assume that the interaction mainly depends on the distance in front—our results demonstrate that the distance to the follower also significantly influences movement. Using the distance to the follower combined with the subject pedestrian’s headway distance to predict the speed improves the estimation by 18% compared to the prediction using the space in front alone.