Pedestrian movement in crossing flows

Abstract

To decide on the appropriate size and layout of booking halls and passenger interchanges it is necessary to have some knowledge of how flows of pedestrians affect one another. This paper describes a study that was undertaken by the Operational Research Department of London Transport Executive to extend previous work on unidirectional flow to the conflict situation. Pedestrian movement was filmed at a site in Victoria Station, London and statistical regression analysis was used to determine the relationship between the size of crossing flows and the speed of movement.It appears that a useful design criterion is the total of pedestrian flows per metre width over all conflicting directions. In order to keep the delay to 50% of unimpeded time a limit of about 70 persons per minute is indicated.