Passenger flow bottleneck decongestion in subway stations: a simulation study

Abstract

The impact of large passenger flow during peak hours causes serious congestion in subway stations, and passenger flow bottlenecks appear in many places, which affects travel efficiency and safety. How to eliminate the bottlenecks is an urgent problem to be solved. In this paper, we first analyze the causes and regions of bottlenecks, and we propose three decongestion solutions: (a) moving the security check machines from the station hall to the entrance channel; (b) adding isolation belts in front of the area of escalators; and (c) separating opposite passengers flow by using isolation belts. We conduct a case study on Guomao Station, Beijing, China to verify the effectiveness of the solutions. Specifically, we establish a microscopic model to simulate the passenger flow in a subway station, and the simulation results show that decongestion solutions can reduce the queueing length of security bottleneck by more than 30%, while decreasing the passenger density in non-paying areas of the station hall by more than 50%. The decongestion solutions proposed in this paper can eliminate the bottlenecks in subway stations effectively and practicably.