Properties of pedestrians walking in line. II. Stepping behavior

Abstract

In human crowds, interactions among individuals give rise to a variety of self-organized collective motions that help the group to effectively solve the problem of coordination. However, it is still not known exactly how humans adjust their behavior locally, nor what are the direct consequences on the emergent organization. One of the underlying mechanisms of adjusting individual motions is the stepping dynamics. In this paper, we present first quantitative analysis on the stepping behavior in a one-dimensional pedestrian flow studied under controlled laboratory conditions. We find that the step length is proportional to the velocity of the pedestrian, and is directly related to the space available in front of him, while the variations of the step duration are much smaller. This is in contrast with locomotion studies performed on isolated pedestrians and shows that the local density has a direct influence on the stepping characteristics. Furthermore, we study the phenomena of synchronization-walking in lock step-and show its dependence on flow densities. We show that the synchronization of steps is particularly important at high densities, which has direct impact on the studies of optimizing pedestrians' flow in congested situations. However, small synchronization and antisynchronization effects are found also at very low densities, for which no steric constraints exist between successive pedestrians, showing the natural tendency to synchronize according to perceived visual signals.

A remote‐controlled observatory for behavioural and ecological research: A case study on emperor penguins

“…This finding is counter to the intuitive assumption that penguins in a queue wait for a sufficient gap to appear in front of them before they move. A similar behaviour has been reported for humans in dense queues, who are reluctant to stand still and instead prefer to perform small steps (Jelić, Appert-Rolland, Lemercier, & Pettré, 2012).…”

Investigation of pedestrian dynamics in circle antipode experiments: Analysis and model evaluation with macroscopic indexes

“…Seyfried et al (2005) investigated the single line experiment and found the linear relation between the velocity and the inverse of the density. The kindred experiment performed by Jelic et al (2012a) drew similar results, and a further investigation on the stepping behaviors (Jelic et al, 2012b) showed that the step length was positively correlated with the pedestrian velocity, and the available space in front was negatively correlated with the variations of the step duration. In the uni-directional flow experiments, plenty of experimental results between macroscopic parameters, i.e., density, velocity and flow, have been accumulated (Hankin & Wright, 1958;Older, 1968;Mori & Tsukaguchi, 1987;Weidmann, 1993;Helbing et al, 2007), and Zhang et al (2011) performed a comparison between four different measurement methods and found that the Voronoi method could resolve the fine structure of the fundamental diagram.…”

Collective motion of oscillatory walkers

“…Phase-phase coupling is considered within the framework of the Kuramoto model [19], a paradigmatic model describing synchronization phenomena in nature. In the present study we assume that the phases of successive particles tend to synchronize, which is experimentally suggested when pedestrians walk in a dense crowd [13]. Since each walker follows its predecessor and ignores its successors, the interaction is unidirectional and local.…”

“…Since the collective motion of self-propelled particles (SPP) began to attract interest [2][3][4], many studies have been conducted in various contexts [5], including pedestrian crowds [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14], bird flocks [15], and insect swarms [16,17]. However, the effect of locomotion on macroscopic behavior remains an open question.…”

“…However, the effect of locomotion on macroscopic behavior remains an open question. In fact, recent experiments in the field of pedestrian dynamics suggest that the oscillatory motion of pedestrian walking may have a significant effect on overall dynamics [13,14]. Jelić et al studied the collective dynamics of pedestrians walking in a line, focusing on bilateral oscillations during walking [13].…”