Effect of walking height on movement of individuals and crowds in a corridor

Abstract

The safe and efficient evacuation of pedestrians in an emergency has been widely investigated in the past. Stooping is a common walking posture of pedestrians in evacuation. Understanding the basic laws of pedestrian movement with stoop posture is instructive for developing effective evacuation management in an emergency. However, the evacuation behaviors and movement characteristics of stooped pedestrians are still unclear. In this study, a series of experiments on individuals and crowds with different walking heights were conducted in an 18 m long corridor. It was found that a left-deflection phenomenon appears in the transition from upright walking to stooped walking, and the deflection angles of pedestrians decrease with increasing walking height. The influence of walking height on pedestrian velocity is revealed through the comparison of individual and crowd movement. Restricted walking height can promote the movement velocity of individuals at low speed levels, and weakens the velocity at high speed levels. In contrast to the individual, the velocities of crowds at different speed levels will be enhanced by restricted walking height. Generally, pedestrian movement is affected by the initial motivation, walking height and pedestrian density. Restricted walking height has an encouraging effect in the motivation of pedestrian movement but can increase the physical discomfort of pedestrians. Besides, crowd density has an inhibitory effect on pedestrian movement, and restricted walking height can alleviate high crowd density, implying that appropriate stoop movement can facilitate pedestrian traffic and evacuation to some extent.