Abstract:The placement of obstacles in front of doors is believed to be an effective strategy to increase the flow of pedestrians, hence improving the evacuation process. Since it was first suggested, this counterintuitive feature is considered a hallmark of pedestrian flows through bottlenecks. Indeed, despite the little experimental evidence, the placement of an obstacle has been hailed as the panacea for solving evacuation problems. In this work, we challenge this idea and experimentally demonstrate that the pedestr… Show more
“…The degree of motivation changes the dynamics of a crowd within the bottleneck as well as in front of it. In [23], the authors examine the polarisation of velocity within a crowd in a bottleneck experiment. They observe that high motivation can lead to temporary collective transversal movement which in turn increases the risk of tripping and falling.…”
This article presents an interdisciplinary study of physical and social psychological effects on crowd dynamics based on a series of bottleneck experiments. Bottlenecks are of particular interest for applications such as crowd management and design of emergency routes because they limit the performance of a facility. In addition to previous work on the dynamics within the bottleneck, this study focuses on the dynamics in front of the bottleneck, more specifically, at entrances. The experimental set-up simulates an entrance scenario to a concert consisting of an entrance gate (serving as bottleneck) and a corridor formed by barriers. The parameters examined are the corridor width, degree of motivation and priming of the social norm of queuing. The analysis is based on head trajectories and questionnaires. We show that the density of persons per square metre depends on motivation and also increases continuously with increasing corridor width, meaning that a density reduction can be achieved by a reduction of space. In comparison to other corridor widths observed, the narrowest corridor is rated as being fairer, more comfortable and as showing less unfair behaviour. Pushing behaviour is seen as ambivalent: it is rated as unfair
and
listed as a strategy for faster access.
“…The degree of motivation changes the dynamics of a crowd within the bottleneck as well as in front of it. In [23], the authors examine the polarisation of velocity within a crowd in a bottleneck experiment. They observe that high motivation can lead to temporary collective transversal movement which in turn increases the risk of tripping and falling.…”
This article presents an interdisciplinary study of physical and social psychological effects on crowd dynamics based on a series of bottleneck experiments. Bottlenecks are of particular interest for applications such as crowd management and design of emergency routes because they limit the performance of a facility. In addition to previous work on the dynamics within the bottleneck, this study focuses on the dynamics in front of the bottleneck, more specifically, at entrances. The experimental set-up simulates an entrance scenario to a concert consisting of an entrance gate (serving as bottleneck) and a corridor formed by barriers. The parameters examined are the corridor width, degree of motivation and priming of the social norm of queuing. The analysis is based on head trajectories and questionnaires. We show that the density of persons per square metre depends on motivation and also increases continuously with increasing corridor width, meaning that a density reduction can be achieved by a reduction of space. In comparison to other corridor widths observed, the narrowest corridor is rated as being fairer, more comfortable and as showing less unfair behaviour. Pushing behaviour is seen as ambivalent: it is rated as unfair
and
listed as a strategy for faster access.
“…In addition to the velocity fluctuation another measure has been taken to account for changes in velocity, the so-called “alignment parameter”. This measure had been already introduced in 26 , but in that case the whole room had been accounted and it was not used in the frame of a statistical analysis comparing several experiments. Figure 7 Evolution of the alignment parameter in the regions of Fig.…”
Section: Methodsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Flow rate is one of the most commonly used quantities to assess evacuation efficiency and it is also an important value used in building codes 43 . Although an extensive analysis relative on the flow rate for the considered experiments has been already carried out in previous works 26 , 27 , its relation with other universal crowd measures was never studied and we judged therefore necessary reconsidering it in this work.…”
Section: Methodsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…To allow recreating conditions similar to a real emergency evacuation while ensuring the safety of participants, a second set of experiments was performed by involving professionally trained soldiers of the Spanish army. In this second experimental campaign (details on these experiments are given in 26 ) 181 soldiers were recruited as participants. However, since soldier had the possibility to opt out at any time, the number of participants for each trial varied between 165 and 181.…”
Section: Experimental Setup and Proceduresmentioning
Although some experimental evidence showed that an obstacle placed in front of a door allows making people’s evacuations faster, the efficacy of such a solution has been debated for over 15 years. Researchers are split between those who found the obstacle beneficial and those who could not find a significant difference without it. One of the reasons for the several conclusions lies in the variety of the experiments performed so far, both in terms of competitiveness among participants, geometrical configuration and number of participants. In this work, two unique datasets relative to evacuations with/without obstacle and comprising low and high competitiveness are analyzed using state-of-the-art definitions for crowd dynamics. In particular, the so-called congestion level is employed to measure the smoothness of collective motion. Results for extreme conditions show that, on the overall, the obstacle does not reduce density and congestion level and it could rather slightly increase it. From this perspective, the obstacle was found simply shifting the dangerous spots from the area in front of the exit to the regions between the obstacle and the wall. On the other side, it was however confirmed, that the obstacle can stabilize longitudinal crowd waves, thus reducing the risk of trampling, which could be as important (in terms of safety) as improving the evacuation time. However, under urgent, competitive, but non-extreme conditions, the obstacle generally had a positive effect, helping channeling the flow of pedestrians through the exit while facilitating their interactions.
“…Several factors affect the mobility of pedestrians. Among these are building layouts [1], desired destinations, psychological and physiological factors [2], and surroundings (people, obstacles) [3], [4]. Understanding each of these factors plays a crucial role in the development of various application domains such as socially-aware robots [5], autonomous vehicle navigation systems [6] and human trajectory prediction models [7].…”
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.
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