Microscopic travel-time analysis of bottleneck experiments

ABSTRACT

This contribution provides a microscopic experimental study of pedestrian motion in front of the bottleneck. The identification of individual pedestrians in variety of experiments enables to explain the high variance of travel time by the heterogeneity of the crowd. Some pedestrians are able to push effectively through the crowd, some get trapped in the crowd for significantly longer time. This ability to push through the crowd is associated with a slope of individual linear model of the dependency of travel time on the number of pedestrians in front of the bottleneck. Further detailed study of the origin of such ability is studied by means of the route choice, i.e. strategy whether to walk around the crowd or to walk directly through it. The study reveals that the ability to push through the crowd is a combination of aggressiveness in conflicts and willingness to overtake the crowd.

Keywords:

• Pedestrian dynamics
• egress experiments
• path analysis
• travel time
• aggressiveness
• classification according to strategy

Acknowledgments

Experimental records available at the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?=d4zZpvhahYM. All experiment participants confirmed their approval with processing and publishing recorded materials for academic purposes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation under the grant no. GA15-15049S and by Czech Technical University under the grant no.SGS15/214/OHK4/3T/14.