Abstract
High-deck coaches form an essential component of mass transportation systems in China. Safe evacuation from high-deck coaches is facing dire challenges. However, evacuation behaviour from high-deck coaches has not been deeply understood yet. In this study, a novel conceptual framework is firstly proposed to capture the evacuation behaviour of coach passengers, and next based on which 22 full-scale experiments have been conducted to examine the effect of three selected factors: available exits, lighting conditions and age groups on the evacuation behaviour of Chinese passengers in a high-deck coach, in a systematic and quantitative way. Four performance indicators of evacuation behaviour, i.e., evacuation time, pre-evacuation time, flow rate and crowdedness, were collected and analysed. The results indicate that limited available exits and the dim lighting condition (less than 1 lux) significantly reduce the evacuation efficiency and increase the crowdedness within the aisle area regardless of the age groups. Compared to young students, the evacuation of middle-aged people is observed to have a significantly longer pre-evacuation time, lower evacuation efficiency, and higher level of crowdedness. In addition, young students’ pre-evacuation times are found to conform to the Weibull distribution, whereas middle-aged people’ pre-evacuation times could be modelled with the Loglogistic distribution. Empirical results of this study could be helpful for the improvement of the safety design of high-deck coaches, and provide valuable benchmarks for the development of coach evacuation behaviour and simulation models.
Highlights
With growing passenger demand for public transport, evacuation safety of passengers in case of emergencies has attracted extensive concerns from the scientific community
Because the varying response time and the inactive behaviour of passengers that were observed in the experiments could lead to considerably unpredictable variances in overall evacuation times, only qualitative statistics analyses were conducted on evacuation times to determine the effect of available exits, lighting conditions and age groups
The results indicate that while the statistically significant difference is observed between the flow rate of the front and rear doors for young students, such a difference is not apparent for middle-aged people
Summary
With growing passenger demand for public transport, evacuation safety of passengers in case of emergencies has attracted extensive concerns from the scientific community. According to the statistics of catastrophic road accidents (with more than 10 deaths) from 2015 to 2017 in China, high-deck coaches accounted for 34.4% of these accidents [13] To cope with such high risks, specific regulations have been formulated in different countries [14]. The basic contents and principles of different regulations are identical, detailed provisions are diverse, resulting in the structural differences of high-deck coaches in different countries. Such differences in internal layouts and exit designs between countries would have important effects on the evacuation of passengers. It is essential to explore the evacuation behaviour of passengers in a high-deck coach under the specific coach safety regulation and cultural context
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