01506609

Component

Planning and management of emergency evacuation have recently received much attention by the transportation research community, given the several recent major disasters in USA and elsewhere in the world. Much of this recent research has focused on the evacuation of drivers and passengers in vehicles. The movement of pedestrians from their walking origins, such as their assigned seats at a large event, to their walking destinations, such as their parked vehicles has largely been neglected. This pedestrian walking behavior has a direct and crucial impact on departure curves of the evacuating vehicles from the evacuation origins. This paper studies the role and a strategy of managing pedestrian traffic in emergency evacuations. A large-scale simulation model is developed for analyzing the performance of different evacuation strategies. Two scenarios are simulated and analyzed for evaluating a current pedestrian traffic management: the current strategy and a proposed new one which basically assigns evacuation gates and parking when an event ticket is purchased by or given to an attendee. Data from simulation runs indicate the proposed strategy improves several evacuation measures, such as event clearance times for various fractions of attendees.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ANB80T Emergency Evacuation.

01503729

14-1382

English

18p

2014

Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Emergency management; Evacuation; Pedestrian flow; Pedestrian traffic; Simulation; Special events; Stadiums

Phoenix (Arizona)

Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Planning and Forecasting; Security and Emergencies; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2014 Paper #14-1382

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 27 2014 2:31PM