Pedestrian Crowd Management Experiments: A Data Guidance Paper

Abstract

Understanding pedestrian dynamics and the interaction of pedestrians with their environment is crucial to the safe and comfortable design of pedestrian facilities. Experiments offer the opportunity to explore the influence of individual factors. In the context of the project CroMa (Crowd Management in transport infrastructures), experiments were conducted with about 1000 participants to test various physical and social psychological hypotheses focusing on people's behaviour at railway stations and crowd management measures. The following experiments were performed: i) Train Platform Experiment, ii) Crowd Management Experiment, iii) Single-File Experiment, iv) Personal Space Experiment, v) Boarding and Alighting Experiment, vi) Bottleneck Experiment and vii) Tiny Box Experiment. This paper describes the basic planning and implementation steps, outlines all experiments with parameters, geometries, applied sensor technologies and pre- and post-processing steps. All data can be found in the pedestrian dynamics data archive.

Waiting in crowded places: influence of number of pedestrians, waiting time and obstacles

“…This article only considers experiments from one side. Details on the other experiments and the overall procedure can be found in [ 39 ]. The experiments were conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic and in order to minimize the risk of infection all participants were tested prior to entering the hall and were requested to wear masks at all times.…”

“…Participants indicated that they did not act differently than they would have before the pandemic ( M = 2.69) and had already been inside crowds elsewhere since the pandemic had started ( M = 4.02). A more detailed description on the ice-breaker experiments and the questionnaires regarding pandemic influences can be found in [ 39 ]. In total, 1038 participants took part in the experiments, with ages ranging from 18 to 85 years (median: 31 years).…”

“…Therefore, this study investigates the influence of obstacles, waiting time and number of passengers on the distribution at railway platforms by performing laboratory experiments. These factors were chosen as they were expected to have a relevant influence on the distribution of passengers and were technically possible to investigate within the framework of a given set of laboratory experiments (for details see Methods section and [ 39 ]).…”

How Approaching Angle, Bottleneck Width and Walking Speed Affect the Use of a Bottleneck by Individuals

“…For the ‘normal’ motivation, participants were instructed to ‘walk purposefully, but without haste’, and for the ‘hurried’ condition to ‘walk briskly, but not to run’. A table with all variables and increments has been published together with the raw data in the Pedestrian Dynamics Data Archive [ 31 ].…”

“…Data are published and openly available at Forschungszentrum Jülich, Institute for Advanced Simulation: Data Archive of Experiments on Pedestrian Dynamics [ 31 ] (accessed on 9 January 2024).…”