Insights toward efficient angle design of pedestrian crowd egress point bottlenecks

Abstract

Understanding the impact of geometrical characteristics of bottlenecks in pedestrian egress behaviour is ubiquitous in safe and effective crowd management. This paper studies how funnel-shaped bottlenecks with different angles affect the microscopic and macroscopic properties of pedestrian egress flow. The minimum width of the bottleneck in all experiments was one metre and the egress point was exactly in the middle. Two scenarios were designed and experimented. First, the large width of the bottleneck was constant and the length, and subsequently the slope, was varied. Second, the length of the bottleneck was constant and the large width, and subsequently the slope, was varied. As a result, the impact of length, large width, and slope were examined. The results suggest that the best-performing bottleneck with regard to angle follows a certain trend, with 26.6° being the most efficient. Further, it was observed that upon increasing the large width the flow increases.

KEYWORDS:

• Pedestrian bottleneck
• egress point
• exit layout

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.