Passenger Flows at Escalators – Arriving at Count Interval for Design Flow Estimation

Abstract

Selection of a count interval to extract flow data on pedestrian facilities seems to be governed by the operational environment of the facility and context of the study. Based on the flow condition, which may be intermittent, uniform, or periodic, the count interval has been found varying between 1 minute and 5 minutes. For instantaneous peaks, it is reduced to even 10s. The selection of a count interval will impact the flow values and subsequently the design requirements and operational efficiency. Present study, in this light, focusses on escalators located at metro rail stations. The study region is Delhi, India. Based on the analysis, the count interval for data extraction is recommended as 24 seconds, which is expected to result in a flow that does not cause unnecessary increase in facility size and keep it usable for most of the time. The absolute design flow value may be considered between 140–148 ped/m/min, which is the 5th highest rank order peak flow. The results are expected to optimize the resources, both for data collection and size of a facility.

Come together: A unified description of the escalator capacity

“…• A time gap of T = 0.35s is too long to be compatible with observed flows of [12,[14][15][16] and data provided by [3][4][5]. In order to explain these experimental data with Eq (16), therefore smaller T-values have to be used, see the above bullet points.…”

“…Only in the limit of a vanishing time gap T, the capacity can get in principle arbitrarily large. In Eq (16), this hypothetical (!) case then corresponds to a linear rise of C esc with increasing v esc .…”

“…The fact that Eq (16) explicitly contains the model parameter T is a strong indication that the underlying collision-free speed model [26] is very well suited for describing the passenger dynamics of escalators, at least for the considered escalator widths. Moreover, we would like to stress that T is the only 'free' parameter in Eq (16) that can be used to adjust the simulations. All other parameters are properties of the escalator itself and are therefore fixed for a given scenario.…”

“…The T-dependence of the capacity in the range 0.15s � T � 0.3s is shown in Fig 9 . To further verify the obtained results, we compare them with field studies summarized in Table 1 and with data provided by escalator manufacturers. When comparing Eq (16) with the literature, the following points should be noted:…”

“…In • Eq (16) describes the capacity of an escalator which is the maximum agent flow that can be realized over a certain period of time. Since the necessary boundary conditions are difficult to come across in real-life situations, observed results of field studies should lie on or below Depending on which entries in Table 1 are considered valid, T can be chosen such that this is indeed the case.…”