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| Home > Publications database > Influence of Corridor Width and Motivation on Pedestrians in Bottlenecks |
| Home > Publications database > Influence of Corridor Width and Motivation on Pedestrians in Bottlenecks |
| Conference Presentation (After Call) | FZJ-2019-03713 |
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2019
Abstract: Understanding the behaviour of crowds is important in order to draw up or to adapt safety regulations for buildings and events. People confronted with spatial bottlenecks either follow the social norm of queuing or they start pushing. The latter leads to a high density of persons per square meter which can result in fatalities. A typical bottleneck situation, in which pushing might occur, is at the entrance gates to concert areas or events. We present bottleneck experiments investigating the influence of the width of a corridor leading straight to an entrance gate (see Figure 1-Left for the experimental setup) on the behaviour of the participants. Besides the corridor width, also the motivation of the participants was varied. The basic idea was that there might be a transition between a queuing and a pushing behaviour influenced by corridor width and motivation.Each group of participants performed two runs. The situation they had to imagine was that they want to enter the concert of their favourite band. In the first run, the motivation was high which was communicated as follows: Imagine that only the first persons who enter will have an undisturbed view of the stage. The others cannot see the stage directly. In the second run, the motivation was reduced by the announcement that everyone will be able to see the stage.The presented results are based on individual trajectories that were extracted from overhead video recordings. Those results include, e.g., density and waiting time analysis. According to our findings, the density in front of the entrance gate as well as the area in which high densities are observed are generally increased by increasing the corridor width (see Figure 1-Right). For most groups, there is a density gap of ca. 3 – 4 people per square meter between the run with high motivation (h0) and the corresponding run with low motivation (h-). This does not hold for a small number of participants. However, this gap indicates the presence of two density stages. The low stage suggests that the social norm of queuing dominates whereas the high stage suggests that a pushing behaviour dominates and the social norm of queuing is broken. Further results are based on the ratio of active pushers to passive people and on analysis of the initial velocity, the preferred direction of movement and of the time-gap of persons reaching the target within the entrance gate.
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