Experimental Investigation on the Alleged Gender-Differences in Pedestrian Dynamics: A Study Reveals No Gender Differences in Pedestrian Movement Behavior

Abstract

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.

Experimental study of the effects of culture and location on single-file fundamental diagrams

“…Therefore, Ghanaians require a smaller personal space zone, enabling them to travel quicker than a similar density of German pedestrians and African students in China. The following information has been discovered by experiments on how locations/cultural factors have impacted pedestrians' movement behaviour: it has previously been believed that women move differently from men due to their cultural backgrounds [ 32 ]. However, this research could not verify this assumption in the study because the focus was on the locations and cultural impacts; although males and females displayed similar features, the study needed help digging deep into it.…”

“…The study kept other comparable factors in evaluating the influence of geographical location and culture. The research compared India and Germany [ 2 ] with about the same density and Germany and Palestine with just about the same density, taking into account the differences in pedestrian dynamics based on the composition of the groups [ 32 ]. One noticed that the pedestrians were arranged systematically during Ghanaian experiments and African students in China.…”

“…German experiments downloaded data from the pedestrian dynamics data archive [ 1 ], an analysis of the fundamental diagram (FD) relationships between Palestinian and German experiments ref. [ 32 ] Of the report.…”

An attempt to distinguish physical and socio-psychological influences on pedestrian bottleneck

“…A special representation of the fundamental diagram is the speed distance function equation (3.2), including the model parameters v 0 the desired speed, T the slope factor and l the minimal distance between agents. Experimental studies on the fundamental diagram have shown that they depend on a set of individual properties P = {P 1 , P 2 , …} of pedestrians like culture, body height, gender, or motivation [32][33][34][35][36][37]. However, they also depend on various environmental factors E = {E 1 , E 2 , …} like the width of the facility, the presence of rhythm or background music [38,39] or visibility [40].…”

Simulation of Single-File Pedestrian Flow under High-Density Condition by a Modified Social Force Model

“…The study found that pedestrians who have a higher motivation have a stronger ability to adapt their velocities. In addition, the topic of gender influence is discussed by Subaih et al [17] and Dias et al [18]. Subaih et al [17] found that the mean velocity of exclusively male pedestrians is approximately the same as exclusively female pedestrians, thus there is no gender difference in pedestrian movement behavior.…”