01557691

Component

This paper uses empirical data to explore the spatial fluctuations of pedestrian velocities in bidirectional streams. It is shown that individual pedestrian velocities vary largely over time and space depending on the crowd size, location of individuals within the crowd, and formation of self-organized lanes. Self-organization phenomenon significantly affects the fluctuations of pedestrian velocities. The authors found that the velocity profile in bidirectional pedestrian streams do not necessarily follow a hyperbolic form. Rather, the shape of the velocity profile is highly dependent on the formation of the self-organized lanes. It is also shown that spatial fluctuations of pedestrian velocities along and transverse to the flow direction can be modeled by a sum of Gaussian distributions. Results suggest that the effect of self-organization phenomenon is strong enough that for the same crowd size, the velocity distribution does not considerably change when pedestrians are highly mixed compared to totally separated lanes. It is also shown that when crowd size increases, the variability of pedestrian velocities transverse to the flow direction decreases due to increasing spatial constraints. The variability of pedestrian velocities along the flow direction does not seem to be necessarily dependent on the crowd size especially when multiple dynamic lanes are formed.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHB45 Traffic Flow Theory and Characteristics.

01550057

15-3615

English

15p

2015

Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References

Crowds; Pedestrian flow; Pedestrian traffic; Spatial analysis; Velocity

Bidirectional flow; Fluctuations; Gaussian distributions; Self-organization (Traffic flow)

Operations and Traffic Management; Pedestrians and Bicyclists; I73: Traffic Control

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2015 Paper #15-3615

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 30 2014 1:12PM