Users’ Evaluation of Rail Systems in Mass Events

Abstract

Each year during the ninth month of the Muslim lunar calendar, more than 2 million Muslim pilgrims from around the world travel to the Holy City of Mecca in Saudi Arabia for Hajj, an annual religious pilgrimage. A significant milestone in the effort to improve the existing transport system in the Holy City was the introduction of the Southern Masha'er Rail Line during the 2010 pilgrimage season. In the first year of operation, the line operated at only 30% of its full capacity before full implementation in the following year, when the line operated at full capacity of 72,000 passengers per hour. Results are presented of a users’ survey that aimed to assess the performance of the rail line from the perspective of its users. The analysis revealed that rail users faced longer access, waiting, and egress times compared with regular rail operations standards. However, survey results showed that the majority of pilgrims found these times to be tolerable. Moreover, the majority of users found the rail line and its stations to be of excellent quality and gave positive recommendations for using the rail line in the future. The analysis also produced some interesting observations that may be of relevance to rail operation in similar crowded events. Those observations are highlighted.

Elderly Hajj pilgrims activity recognition based on candidate classification technique

“…All the rituals of hajj are carried out by more than three million pilgrims and all the rituals are bound to time and place. 31,32 Crowd Management is one of the main issues since millions of pilgrims have to perform all the rituals within 5 to 6 days in destined places. Many tragedies happened in the history of Hajj Pilgrimage due to stampede and other accidents.…”

Progress of IoT Research Technologies and Applications Serving Hajj and Umrah

“…An optimization method was suggested by Felemban et al [ 107 ] to schedule the movement of pilgrims using the train during the Hajj days, as previously tested in research [ 25 , 31 ]. The authors of [ 107 ] identified three factors that affect the scheduling process, which are the type of train movement, the location of the pilgrim camp, and the camps to the permitted stations and vice versa.…”

“…IoT Technologies and their applications have also gained tangible attention in the Hajj and Umrah crowd systems [ 23 , 24 ], which their impact evident in many places in the two holy cities, Makkah and Madinah, including the two holy mosques, the holy sites, galleries, libraries, and museums [ 25 ]. As considered, Hajj is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, the basic acts that all Muslims are supposed to perform at least once in life.…”

Personal Privacy Evaluation of Smart Devices Applications Serving Hajj and Umrah Rituals

“…These religious visitors are known as Al-Rahman guests pretending their main purpose of visiting is the holy lands and holy house of Allah. Many government and private sectors provide various services to Al-Rahman guests to facilitate their worships performance (Kaysi et al, 2013).…”