Empirical investigation of trajectories and desired walking velocity of pedestrian walking through angled-corridor

Abstract

Trajectories and walking velocity are two crucial metrics that become a basis in pedestrian flow analysis. Both metrics are governed by many factors, and some of the factors considered in this study are the angle of a corridor, track distance, number density of pedestrians, uni- or bi-directional flow and width of corridor. This paper is aimed at reporting empirical investigation of the effect of angled-corridor on pedestrian flow by postulating microscopically the trajectories and desired walking velocity of pedestrians. We have conducted one controlled experiment consists of 30 numbers of unidirectional walking tasks on a built corridor for different degrees of corner (60°, 90°, and 135°) by maintaining the width of the corridor as 2.25 m. A total of 990 samples of pedestrians walking behaviour were collected during the experiments. The finding summarised the pedestrians’ desired walking velocity and the trajectories of walking pedestrians for each type of the angled-corridor. The averaged-desired walking velocity of female and male (female; male) pedestrians for 60°-, 90°-, and 135°-corridor are (1.37 m/s; 1.42 m/s), (1.08 m/s; 1.03 m/s), and (1.10 m/s; 1.08m/s), respectively. The normal L-shaped corridor (90° corridor) gives the lowest averaged-desired walking velocity compared to 60° and 135°. Besides, the trajectory of pedestrians shows the preference of pedestrians to use the inner track of the corridor due to the shorter distance. About 15.21% of pedestrians changed their trajectory from outer to inner track during the experiment for all angled-corridors. With regards to that scenario, the flow was affected and the pedestrians started to queue was witnessed during the experiment. These finding could be notable interest for all evacuation studies that aim a good strategies and design solution in order to prevent crowd disaster.Trajectories and walking velocity are two crucial metrics that become a basis in pedestrian flow analysis. Both metrics are governed by many factors, and some of the factors considered in this study are the angle of a corridor, track distance, number density of pedestrians, uni- or bi-directional flow and width of corridor. This paper is aimed at reporting empirical investigation of the effect of angled-corridor on pedestrian flow by postulating microscopically the trajectories and desired walking velocity of pedestrians. We have conducted one controlled experiment consists of 30 numbers of unidirectional walking tasks on a built corridor for different degrees of corner (60°, 90°, and 135°) by maintaining the width of the corridor as 2.25 m. A total of 990 samples of pedestrians walking behaviour were collected during the experiments. The finding summarised the pedestrians’ desired walking velocity and the trajectories of walking pedestrians for each type of the angled-corridor. The averaged-desired walki...