Pedestrian microscopic simulation models can aid crowd management only if they can reproduce the crowd behavior correctly. To calibrate and validate the model, it is important to understand crowd movement during various activities involved in mass gathering events. A common practice in such gathering is to hold attendees in waiting area in near corridors separated by crowd barriers before the event and allow entering the event only after a designated time. The crowd is released in small batches to avoid overcrowding inside. Long waiting hours, anger, excitement, competitive feeling etc. can make crowd aggressive during such entries. Crowd flow characteristics due to such behavior is difficult to recreate in pedestrian experimental studies in laboratory setting. This paper studied interrupted flow of such crowd through a narrow corridors made of strong railing channel inside a temple. Interrupted flow lead to formation of one dimensional stop and go waves. These stop and go waves were studied from the trajectory data. The average speed of waves propagating over longer distance were also estimated. The quantitative output from this study can be used to calibrate and validate simulation models of such activity during mass gathering events.
Large people gatherings in public places exhibit crowd dynamics that are quite complex. Such mass events with high densities are fraught with potentially serious consequences if not understood and managed properly. In mass religious processions, the participants in the crowd are emotional and mostly impulsive and often crowd disasters occur due to the behaviour of the crowd. These events have great potential to cause safety hazards to the people. This paper attempts to narrate the typical situations of crowd dynamics observed in the Kumbh Mela procession-2016 and to describe the characteristics of the crowd that have not been reported in literature so far but have a significant impact on the crowd. Extreme crowd pressures resulting in individual loss control due to psychological and physiological factors, heterogeneity in the crowd, group behaviour and their induced competitiveness, unexpected behaviour exhibited due to the motivation behind participating in such procession makes it a typical crowd concentrated event to study the potentially critical dynamics of crowd. Physical and psychological forces acting on the people and their resulting dynamics of crowd in the Kumbh Mela procession 2016 lead to serpentine behaviour, which can possibly lead to crowd crushes, or any such crowd risk situations. Therefore, the characteristics of crowd participating in the Kumbh Mela procession have to be clearly understood so that it helps in better planning and well-organized movement patterns.
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