Local performance measures of pedestrian traffic

Introduc tion. Space-planning solutions for underground stations have an effect on the comfort and safety of passengers. Mathematical modelling is a perspective method for solving problems dealing with the determination of adequacy of adopted space-planning solutions for stations depending on passenger traffic. Aims and purpo ses. The purpose of the study is to justify the method of mathematical modelling of passenger flows to develop optimal space-planning solutions of interchange stations of underground. To achieve this goal, the following tasks were solved: the development of a model interchange station concept; modelling passenger flows with initial and optimized volume planning solutions; modelling of passenger evacuation from the station in case of fire in the basement of the arriving train’s central carriage. Methods. The paper presents a method of mathematical modelling to justify the space-planning solutions of underground stations. The software package Pathfinder developed an individual flow model of the interchange station, which simulated the passenger flows with initial and optimized volume-planning solutions. The software package PyroSim was used to simulate the spread of fire hazards. Result s and discussion. Based on the results of mathematical modelling, the optimal space-planning solutions for underground stations were determined, on the basis of which the passenger evacuation scenario was performed. It is obtained that there are 3,684 passengers and 296 workers at the station when the evacuation begins. The simulation results showed that the total estimated evacuation time from a typical transfer station is 814 seconds . It is obtained that the values of dangerous fire factors in the calculated points do not reach critical values until the evacuation is completed. Co nclusions. A mathematical model of a typical interchange station has been developed and implemented to determine the optimal space-planning solutions and calculate the safe evacuation of people. On the basis of this study in the new edition of the Code of Practice 120.13330.2022 “Underground” made amendments that determine that the estimated number of passengers evacuating from the station in case of fire, is based on mathematical modelling of passenger traffic during the rush hour.

In the present paper, we investigate arch-shaped equilibrium solutions in the social force model proposed by Helbing and Molnar (Phys Rev E 51:4282, 1995) and Helbing et al. (Nature 407:487, 2000). The social force model is a system of ordinary differential equations, which describe the motion of the pedestrians under a panic situation. In the simulation of the social force model, we observe an intermittent appearance of arch-shaped structures (i.e. the “Blocking clusters” Parisi and Dorso, Physica A 354:606, 2005; Physica A 385:343, 2007; Frank and Dorso, Physica A 390:2135, 2011) around an exit which block up the flow of pedestrians. To understand such a dynamic behavior, we study arch-shaped equilibrium solutions around an exit under the simplest configuration.

The current methodology of analyzing pedestrian levels of service stated in the KHCM (Korean Highway Capacity Manual) excludes pedestrian comfort from its primary measures of effectiveness, resulting in mismatching levels of service calculated with the KHCM and the ones stated by pedestrians on the basis of comfort. This can lead to undesirable designs of pedestrian facilities, and in order to deal with this problem a research was carried out to apply the concept of pedestrian conflict for assessing pedestrian comfort. The approach adopted in this study included recalibrating relationships between pedestrian flow and pedestrian conflict and making adjustments to pedestrian levels of service given in the KHCM. In this effort, characteristics of pedestrian flows and conflicts for five field sites located in Seoul were investigated by using video cameras, and selected pedestrians on the five sites were interviewed to determine their levels of comfort for the given walking conditions. Based on these field survey data, this study then demonstrated that there were close relationships between pedestrian comfort, flow rate, density, and pedestrian conflict. A follow-up adjustment to pedestrian levels of service in the KHCM was proposed by this study and an additional survey of pedestrians discovered that the proposed adjustment would better explain how pedestrian comfort levels change with pedestrian flow for a given facility.

Sustainable mobility mainly refers to cycling, walking, e-scooters, public transport etc. The increase of the usage of these means of transport against the use of motorised vehicles can improve the overall quality of the urban environment. Pedestrian streets play a significant role towards the direction of sustainable mobility and the facilitation of environment friendly daily trips. This research concerns one of the most important pedestrian streets in the centre of the city of Thessaloniki, Greece. The evaluation of the existing situation in the pedestrian street together with the evaluation of various scenarios concerning changes in the behaviour and direction of movement of pedestrians due to incidents is examined in the framework of this paper. The evaluation took place by using the pedestrian simulation software PTV Viswalk and four different scenarios were tested. The first scenario is the base scenario referring to the existing situation. The second scenario deals with an increase in the pedestrian flow due to unexpected events. The other two scenarios refer to evacuation phenomenon, thus preventing access to part of the pedestrian street. The examination concerns the pedestrian Level of Service (LOS) and the identification of critical segments of the pedestrian street in terms of pedestrians’ flow and composition. The simulation results show that even in the case of doubling of pedestrian flow, this will not cause an overall significant drop in LOS, except for specific sections of the pedestrian street. These results can assist the authorities so to minimize walking difficulties in the pedestrian street and at the same time to take care for waiting areas and the provision of optimum evacuation routes.

Bidirectional pedestrian movement is predominant on undivided stairways. Under a given situation, it is imperative to assess the level of service (LOS) provided to pedestrians on a stairway. Currently, limited guidelines are available for assessing the LOS on undivided stairways in South Asian countries. With this motivation, the current study was conducted to develop LOS criteria for undivided stairways by using the case of a busy suburban railway station at Dadar in Mumbai, India. The LOS can be considered as the classification of different pedestrian flow states on the basis of facility performance. This study is focused on employing the k-means clustering technique to define the LOS thresholds of relevant flow variables. Data on four major variables of pedestrian flow are used: space per pedestrian, flow rate, walking speed, and volume-to-capacity ratio. Derived LOS thresholds are then delineated by using the rate of change in slope for the average walking speed of pedestrians. LOS thresholds are further validated for different percentile values of pedestrian flow data to check whether given data sets fall within the range of established LOS thresholds. Ranges of the flow parameters defined for LOS criteria found in this study are significantly different from those reported in the literature and in manuals in developed countries such as the U.S. Highway Capacity Manual. This difference may be attributed to the demographic and sociocultural characteristics of the pedestrians. The results and approach adopted here can be useful for practitioners to assess the LOS of stairways operating under similar pedestrian flow conditions and to respond appropriately for their improvement. The study results can also be useful for the ongoing project of developing a highway capacity manual for India.

Pedestrian movement modeling and simulation is an important way to formulate an emergency evacuation plan. The performance of the pedestrian movement model directly determines the accuracy of the simulation experiment results. Pedestrian movement in the real world is a very complicated process, and this process is susceptible to a variety of external factors (e.g. road conditions, visibility, etc.) and internal factors (e.g. psychological states, etc.) which making it difficult to model pedestrian movement. The social force model draws on the principles of mechanics and proposes a modeling scheme from the perspective of social force which greatly simplifies the process of pedestrian movement modeling. However, the traditional social force model considers the general situation of pedestrian movement and does not target the emergency evacuation scene, which has certain limitations. In this paper we start with the social force model and introduces the concepts of external guides and internal panic emotions to improves the model. In the scene, the influence of the attraction of the guide and the psychological state of the pedestrian on the movement process of the pedestrian are considered. So that the model is more suitable for the emergency evacuation scene with limited field of vision. It also provides a reference for emergency evacuation plans in public places. We take the subway station as the research object and uses Anylogic software to build simulation experiments. The experimental results show that the improved model we proposed in this paper is less than the traditional model in terms of evacuation time by 8.4%, and is better than the traditional model in terms of exit pedestrian density by 21.5%.

Walking habits can affect the self-organizing movement in pedestrian flow. In China, pedestrians prefer to walk along the right-hand side in the collision-avoidance process, and the same is true for the left-hand preference that is followed in several countries. Through experiments with pedestrian flow, we find that the relative position between pedestrians can affect their moving preferences. We propose a kind of collision-avoidance force based on the social force model, which considers the predictions of potential conflict and the relative position between pedestrians. In the simulation, we use the improved model to explore the effect of moving preference on the collision-avoidance process and self-organizing pedestrian movement. We conclude that the improved model can bring the simulation closer to reality and that moving preference is conducive to the self-adjustment of counterflow.

Simulating pedestrian flow through narrow exits

The future of public transport in medium‐sized French cities without underground transport services is difficult to assess without a complete knowledge of the existing and potential demand. These cities are, however, experiencing considerable urban growth, giving rise to problems of urban congestion. This article examines the sensitivity of the demand for public transport from different population clusters against the level of service, posing the following questions. Are there more public transport users — and more public transport trips per user — when the service is better? Which kinds of improvement most affects demand? Is car ownership and use sensitive to the level of service? Empirical data and least‐squares modelling are used to answer these questions.

Social force model is one of the well-known approaches that can successfully simulate pedestrians’ movements realistically. However, it is not suitable to simulate high-density crowd movement realistically due to the model having only three basic crowd characteristics which are goal, attraction, and repulsion. Therefore, it does not satisfy the high-density crowd condition which is complex yet unique, due to its capacity, density, and various demographic backgrounds of the agents. Thus, this research proposes a model that improves the social force model by introducing four new characteristics which are gender, walking speed, intention outlook, and grouping to make simulations more realistic. Besides, the high-density crowd introduces irregular behaviours in the crowd flow, which is stopping motion within the crowd. To handle these scenarios, another model has been proposed that controls each agent with two different states: walking and stopping. Furthermore, the stopping behaviour was categorized into a slow stop and sudden stop. Both of these proposed models were integrated to form a high-density crowd simulation framework. The framework has been validated by using the comparison method and fundamental diagram method. Based on the simulation of 45,000 agents, it shows that the proposed framework has a more accurate average walking speed (0.36 m/s) compared to the conventional social force model (0.61 m/s). Both of these results are compared to the real-world data which is 0.3267 m/s. The findings of this research will contribute to the simulation activities of pedestrians in a highly dense population.

The article discusses issues related to assessing the level of passenger service in urban transport during the off-peak period. As a rule, the vast majority of studies are conducted during the peak period to develop or adjust the route system, calculate the rational number of vehicles on routes, establish patterns of changes in the parameters of the transport process, etc. However, changing the values of the corresponding indicators during the inter-peak period is also of no small importance, since the level and quality of passenger service by hour of the day, the distribution of the required number of vehicles on routes, and compliance with traffic intervals depend on them. The article presents the results of sample surveys conducted using the tabular method on the routes of a specific city street. The filling factor of the vehicle interior was chosen as a criterion for assessing the level of passenger service. A nonlinear regression model for assessing the level of service in urban passenger transport has been developed. The corresponding statistical characteristics of the model parameters are given and its adequacy is assessed. As a result, the pattern of changes in the static coefficient of vehicle interior occupancy has been determined depending on the number of passengers per square meter of available interior space.It has been revealed that the vehicle interior occupancy rate is affected by both the number of passengers per square meter of the cabin and its squared value. It was also found that on the street in question, during the off-peak period, the number of passengers per square meter of available cabin space equal to three or more passengers brings the corresponding value of the static capacity utilization coefficient to its maximum value.

BackgroundNo existing measures of HIV care access consider both spatial proximity to services and provider-related characteristics in a single measure. We developed and applied a tool to: (1) quantify spatial access to HIV care services (supply) and (2) identify underserved areas with respect to HIV cases (demand), by travel mode, in Atlanta.MethodsBuilding on a study of HIV care engagement, data from an HIV care provider database, and HIV case counts by zip code tabulation area (ZCTA) from AIDSVu.org, we fit a discrete choice model to estimate practice characteristics most salient in defining patient care access. Modified spatial gravity modeling quantified supply access based on discrete choice model results separately for travel by car and by public transportation. Relative access scores were calculated by ZCTA, and underserved areas (defined as having low supply access and high HIV case count) were identified for each travel mode.ResultsCharacteristics retained in the final model included: travel distance, available provider-hours, availability of ancillary services, and whether Ryan White patients were accepted. HIV provider supply was higher in urban versus suburban/rural areas for both travel modes, with lower supply access if traveling by public transportation. Underserved areas were concentrated in south and east Atlanta if traveling by public transportation, overlapping with many areas of high poverty. Approximately 7.7 %, if traveling by car, and 64.3 %, if traveling by public transportation, of Atlanta-based persons with diagnosed HIV infection resided in underserved areas.ConclusionThese findings highlight underserved areas in south and east Atlanta if traveling by public transit. Conceptualizing access to medical services spatially and by travel mode may help bridge gaps between patient needs and service availability and improve HIV outcomes.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s40064-016-2515-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

A framework to integrate mode choice in the design of mobility-on-demand systems

Shared space is a concept of urban street design which implies the creation of a level
\nsurface within the whole road reserve and is aimed at encouraging different road users to
\ninteract spontaneously and to negotiate priority with each other. To build successful shared
\nspaces, traffic engineers can rely at present on specific guidelines as well as technical reports.
\nNevertheless, there is no method available to compute the performance of shared spaces in
\nterms of Level Of Service (LOS).
\nIn order to address this gap, a new indicator of traffic quality for pedestrians is being
\ndeveloped. This measure of performance considers aspects of comfort related to the
\ncrossing, which pedestrians use to go from one side of the roadway to the other. During
\nthis movement, discomfort is generated by the necessity to solve the conflicts with vehicles.
\nTherefore, factors which potentially influence comfort are mathematically formulated.
\nLater, the performance indicator can be calibrated on the basis of the opinion of a group
\nof respondents, who evaluated real-world crossing movements in video sequences. The
\neffectiveness and usability of the developed indicator is demonstrated in an exemplary case
\nstudy. A shared street in the district of Bergedorf, Hamburg (D) is selected and filmed.
\nTo reproduce the interaction of road users and the mechanism of space negotiation, an
\ninnovative modeling approach based on social force model (SFM) is proposed. The model
\nis calibrated and implemented in a Java-based simulation tool. Alternative shared space
\nscenarios, as well as conventional ones with space segregation, are simulated.
\nThe goal of this dissertation is to establish a method to evaluate the performances of
\nshared spaces through traffic microsimulation. This method includes the data survey and
\nacquisition, the definition of performance indicators, the development of a microsimulation
\napproach, the calibration of the motion model on the basis of real-world data and finally
\nthe execution of simulations to collect the results. In addition, this work shows the necessity
\nto employ a comfort-based indicator for pedestrian traffic quality in shared spaces. The
\nbenefits of this approach, with respect to conventional efficiency-based indicators as time
\ndelay, is properly shown in real-world situations and successively demonstrated by help of
\nstatistical methods.

In China, many cities are building themselves the transit metropolis, and the reasonable evaluation of level of service (LOS) of public transport system (PTS) is one important aspect. However, to determine the overall LOS is hard because the distribution of service in PTS is not homogeneous with regard to time and space. To address this problem, this study proposes a general framework to determine the LOS scale of PTS based on the distribution of service quality. Under the framework, two classification methods are discussed. Method 1 uses two parameters, the mean and coefficient of variation to model the distribution, and Method 2 is an existing approach that only considers mean. Then the specific use of the framework is expounded for the service attribute of crowding, and Beijing subway line LOS is evaluated. The line LOS is divided into I–IV, whose threshold is expressed as a function of mean and coefficient of variation. The results show that 57.8% of the sample points are in the most crowding level IV in morning peak hours by Method 1, but 60.9% of sample points are in a comfortable level II by Method 2, and the former is more consistent with reality. In addition, it reveals which lines and time periods need to improve the service level. The research proves the feasibility of considering the service distribution to determine the overall LOS of PTS, and it is useful for capturing more detailed information of the system performance in time and space. This research can provide an approach for evaluating and helping to improve the overall service level of PTS for public transport authorities.