Walking Behavior and Pedestrian Flow Characteristics for Different Types of Walking Facilities

Abstract

composition of travelers, transportation facilities, and environment factors, traffic flow characteristics are site and region specific. For example, in the design of pedestrian facilities in Chinese metro stations, the foreign criteria are adopted directly, regardless of the pedestrian flow differences between Chinese and Westerners. This results in an unmatched relationship between pedestrian demand and capacity during peak hours in some Shanghai, China, metro stations. Designing effective and reasonable walking facilities that comply with local pedestrian characteristics is challenged sharply by the dense and regular passenger traffic, a typical representation being subway transfer stations. Meeting that challenge will depend on thorough studies of pedestrian flow characteristics.This paper is organized as follows. The following section reviews the relevant literature on pedestrian traffic flow and introduces the issue of the present research. Next, data collection on selected sites in Shanghai metro stations and the data extraction process adopted in this research are described. In the section on pedestrian flow parameters and relationships, the scatter plots of flow-density, speed-density, and speed-flow are developed according to extracted data discussed in the previous section. Pedestrian flow characteristics for four different types of walking facilities (including one-way passageway, twoway passageway, ascending stairway, and descending stairway) are revealed in the subsequent section. The differences in pedestrian flow characteristics in different facilities are explained combined with walking behavior. Finally, conclusions are drawn and recommendations for future study are presented.

Development of a Bidirectional Pedestrian Stream Model with an Oblique Intersecting Angle

“…Lam et al (2002Lam et al ( , 2003 investigated bi-directional pedestrian movement in several walking facilities in Hong Kong, including signalized crosswalks in various areas. Ye et al (2008) conducted an observational experiment on several walking facilities in Shanghai, including a two-way passageway.…”

Analysis of interrelationship between pedestrian flow parameters using artificial neural network

“…In different countries, many researchers studied pedestrian flows at different pedestrian facilities such as walkways, sidewalks, movements in central business district (CBD) areas and movements under unidirectional or bidirectional flows or under mixed traffic conditions. Most of the researches have observed a linear relationship between speed and density [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. Rahman et al [23] developed speed-density relationship based on ordinary least square (OLS) and weighted regression methods to observe pedestrian characteristics in Dhaka.…”

Effect of stairway width on pedestrian flow characteristics at railway stations

“…On the contrary, many researchers do not agree with this theoretical approach, in view of, mean speed and density are not simple terms in consideration of physiological and psychological behavior of pedestrian, environmental factors and complexity in design of pedestrian facilities (Rahman et al 2013). Hence, many researchers (Yuhaski and Smith 1989;Mitchell and MacGregor 2001;Chen et al 2011;Kawsar, Ghani, Kamil and Mustafa 2014;Ye, Xiaohong, Yang and Wy 2008) measured speed, flow, and density independently for developing the fundamental relationships. However, May (1990), coined that speedflow-density relationships are more location specific.…”