Factors Concerning the Dynamics of Footbridges and Methods for Improving Pedestrians’ Comfort

Abstract

Pedestrian bridges are constructions that are part of the category Bridges, having the particularity that due to much lower loading as compared to that of road or railway bridges, their decks are much slenderer, and can be included in the category of light structures. In this paper several aspects regarding the dynamic behavior of the footbridge structures under the traffic actions correlated with the pedestrians’ comfort are presented. The comfort criteria depend of the frequencies and accelerations of the structure and have to be situated between certain limits. If the frequencies and accelerations of the structure are in the critical domains, measures to modify them have to be taken, some of them being presented in this paper as they are the most usually used.