Investigating the effect of stairs on the bidirectional movement of pedestrians

Abstract

Although bidirectional motion on stairs can be commonly observed

Experimental study on pedestrians’ uni- and bi-directional movement on staircases under emergency conditions

“…The reason lies in that pedestrians have to maintain a personal space for keeping a high evacuation velocity on the staircase, thus inducing small population density in this experiment. In [20], the average bidirectional velocity is only around 0.4 m s −1 , which is much smaller than in this study (0.88 m s −1 ), so population density can grow to a relatively high value of 6 persons/m 2 . The finding was also verified in unidirectional flow on flat areas [36], which presented that people need more space for their comfort at a higher velocity in straight corridors.…”

“…Given the bidirectional experiment in [20] that had explored bidirectional movement with varying flow ratios, it was found that the full bidirectional flow, i.e. ratio = 0.5, was the most dangerous situation, where average velocity always assumes the minimum value, illustrating that complex interactions exist among individuals during full bidirectional flow.…”

“…Velocity-density relationship of full bidirectional staircase evacuation in Ye's experiment [20] is presented in figure 20. Higher velocity and lower population density make this study different to [20].…”

“…Velocity-density relationship of full bidirectional staircase evacuation in Ye's experiment [20] is presented in figure 20. Higher velocity and lower population density make this study different to [20]. Population density can only reach 5 persons/m 2 at most, which is quite a bit smaller than Ye's experiment.…”

“…C lapa et al [19] explored the mutual interaction between ascending firefighters and descending evacuees in a counter-flow scenario, where he observed that the moving velocity decreased during evacuation. Ye [20] performed a controlled experiment to study the bidirectional stair motion and pedestrians' interaction with varying flow ratios by the automatic extraction of trajectories, and observed that full bidirectional flow is not a simple combination of unidirectional pedestrians, which appears to be the most dangerous situation and should be avoided for staircases. In most of these experiments, participants were instructed to walk through the staircase at normal speed.…”