Feature Analysis and Operation Evaluation of Pedestrian Weaving Zone

Abstract

Weaving behavior occurs because of the conflict of pedestrian walking streams, and such behavior manifests itself as weaving points in walking facilities. If many weaving points are concentrated in a relatively stable zone, the zone is defined as a pedestrian weaving zone (PWZ). Weaving behavior has a great impact on pedestrians’ speed and walking comfort, facility capacity, and passenger safety. First, both the concept of the PWZ and PWZ features are defined. By means of controlled experiments, data on weaving zone features and pedestrian weaving behavior are collected from different scenarios. Subsequently, PWZ features are analyzed through geometric features and location attributes of the weaving zone, and it is concluded that the pedestrian flow volume and the ratio of the two pedestrian streams (two-pedestrian-stream ratio) are closely related to the area of the PWZ rather than to the width and length of the pedestrian passageway, and the PWZ is closer to the exit than to the entrance of the passageway. Three new indexes—pedestrian weaving intensity, pedestrian trajectory offset ratio, and distribution density factor of weaving points—are introduced to analyze the operation of the PWZ. Finally, on the basis of the three indexes, the study establishes a pedestrian negative utility model to evaluate the operational status of the PWZ. The PWZ performs better with a decrease of utility. After analysis of the impact of passageway geometric features (passageway width and length) and pedestrian traffic features (pedestrian volume and the two-pedestrian-stream ratio) on the performance of the PWZ, two improvements in the planning and management of pedestrian passageways, through which the negative utility decreases 29.7% and 34.5%, respectively, are presented.

Examining influence of merging architectural features on pedestrian crowd movement

“…Empirical approaches for understanding complex pedestrian crowd behaviours such as turning (Dias et al, 2014), crossing (Helbing et al, 2005;Asano et al, 2009;Dias et al, 2013) and weaving (Wu and Lu, 2013) have been conducted in the past to study collective pedestrian dynamics. However, regarding merging crowd flows, experimental studies (and also modelling) is limited in literature.…”

A Review of Experimental Studies on Complex Pedestrian Movement Behaviors

“…Thus, we highlight diverging behavior as a gap in the empirical study of crowd dynamics. However, regarding a theoretical approach, Wu and Lu (2013) conducted a simulation study case of diverging behavior using Legion software in the application part of their weaving studies and found that an improved design in passageways exits (converted square corners to smoothed ones) could reduce the weaving points in the weaving zone of diverging flows, thereby increasing the flow rate of passageways.…”

“…The difference between entering a door and diverging flows lies in the stabilities of these flows. Unlike the fluctuating flows around a bottleneck, the streams of pedestrians are stable both before and after diverging processes (Wu and Lu, 2013).…”

“…Wu and Lu (2013) performed a laboratory experiment with controlled variables of passageway dimensions and pedestrian stream ratios. Through statistical analysis, the operational features of pedestrian weaving zones were evaluated and design solutions were derived on pedestrian passageways.…”

Study on the Weaving Behavior of High Density Bidirectional Pedestrian Flow

“…The correlation curve proved that the weaving behavior evolved into three basic states (begin, spread and dissipated) but the threshold values of each state were not concerned in this paper. In Wu and Lu's study [18], some controlled experiments were applied to grasp the influence of walking condition on pedestrian weaving flows; the test result shows that the speed of in weaving area is significantly lower than before and after weaving, which is decreased by 10% to 35%. Weng and Feng [19] built a simulation platform to simulate unidirection weave pedestrian from volume, density, and other feature parameters.…”