The fundamental diagrams of elderly pedestrian flow in straight corridors under different densities

Abstract

The worldwide population is aging and countries are facing ongoing challenges in meeting the transportation demand of the elderly. In this study, we investigate the movement characteristics of elders in the straight corridor and compare them with that of young adults. The free speeds of the elderly (about 1.28m/s) are obviously slower than that of the young people (about 1.4m/s) in the laboratory experiments. It is found that the fundamental diagram of the elderly shows the similar trend compared with that of young pedestrians. However, at the same densities the speeds of the elderly are always lower than that of the young pedestrians in the observed density range (< 3.0 m -2 ). When the mean velocity calculated from pedestrian movement at low densities is considered, the two normalized fundamental diagrams agree quite well. The reasons for the differences are explored by analyzing the border distance, the nearest neighbors as well as the spatial distribution areas of the pedestrians. Our findings can be useful for the improvement of the pedestrian modelling and the design of pedestrian facilities that are much friendlier to the elderly.

Experimental Investigation on the Alleged Gender-Differences in Pedestrian Dynamics: A Study Reveals No Gender Differences in Pedestrian Movement Behavior

“…These findings were referred to the impact of cultural differences since both the Chinese and Indians are generally used to moving in relatively more populated spaces than their German counterparts. Other experiments focused on pedestrian compositions [9], [10], [21], [24]. For instance, Cao et al [10], [21] examined the properties of different age groups: young, old, and mixed pedestrians.…”

“…As stated by the authors, height and gender do not affect the FD. Another experiment of straight corridor unidirectional flow was performed in Hefei, China to study the movement characteristics of elderly pedestrians under different densities [9]. A total of 73 pedestrians of mean age 64.7 years volunteered in these experiments.…”

“…Examples of such studies are presented in [10]- [19]. Over the past few years, various studies and experiments have focused on exploring the impact of age [9], [10], [20], [21], gender [10], [22], and culture [8], [23] on pedestrian dynamics. For instance, Chattaraj et al [8] examined the effect of the culture factor on the dynamics of pedestrians in Germany and India.…”

Artificial neural network based modeling on unidirectional and bidirectional pedestrian flow at straight corridors

“…Motivated by that, a pedestrian movement model based on artificial neural network is proposed in this paper to mimic pedestrian behaviors in both unidirectional and bidirectional flow at straight corridors, which are two typical and common phenomena in our real life. Recently, A lot of works about unidirectional and bidirectional flow have been conducted by many researchers including experiments [14,15] and models [16,17]. Scholars still pay attention on the studies of unidirectional and bidirectional flow due to unknown parts of crowd movement mechanism and especially the low quality of reproduced experiment trajectories given by existing pedestrian models.…”

The Influence of Wheelchair Users on Movement in a Bottleneck and a Corridor

“…A significant decrease of the bottleneck capacity for disabled participants is reported. The influence of age (elderly or younger subpopulations) on fundamental diagrams was investigated by [25,26,[66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73]. A difference in characteristics of the fundamental diagrams was observed and stop-and-go waves are more probably to occur, if the population consists of a broader ageing range [70].…”