Experimental Investigation on the Alleged Gender-Differences in Pedestrian Dynamics: A Study Reveals No Gender Differences in Pedestrian Movement Behavior

Abstract

Pedestrian dynamics are affected by several factors including pedestrian compositions. In this article, we examine the movement characteristics of Palestinian pedestrians using the fundamental diagram for single-file movement experiments conducted with an emphasis on gender compositions. Our findings show that the mean velocity of exclusively male pedestrians is approximately the same as exclusively female pedestrians. For instance, when the number of pedestrians is 20, the velocities for male and female are $0.72 \pm {0.10} \,\,ms^{-1}$ and $0.71 \pm {0.11} \,\,ms^{-1}$ , respectively, whereas their velocity decreases gradually if they walk in mixed groups with an average velocity of $0.61 \pm {0.11} \,\,ms^{-1}$ . We also compare our findings with other culture-based experiments to demonstrate that pedestrian cultures have an effect on their movement characteristics. Moreover, we demonstrate that age is another factor that affects pedestrians’ movement. A comparative analysis is performed between Palestinian and Chinese experiments for this purpose. Our results confirm that for relatively high densities older Chinese pedestrians walk faster than young Palestinians in groups of mixed gender.