New Insights into Pedestrian Flow Through Bottlenecks

By Armin Seyfried, O. Passon, Bernhard Steffen, Maik Boltes, Tobias Rupprecht, Wolfram Klingsch. Transportation Science, 2007

501 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Capacity estimation is an important tool for the design and dimensioning of pedestrian facilities. The literature contains different procedures and specifications that show considerable differences with respect to the estimated flow values. Moreover, new experimental data indicate a stepwise growth of capacity with width and thus challenge the validity of the specific flow concept. To resolve these differences, we experimentally studied the unidirectional pedestrian flow through bottlenecks under laboratory conditions. The time development of quantities such as individual velocities, density, and individual time gaps in bottlenecks of different widths is presented. The data show a linear growth of flow with width. The comparison of the results with experimental data from other authors indicates that the basic assumption of the capacity estimation for bottlenecks has to be revised. In contrast to most planning guidelines, our main result is that a jam occurs even if the incoming flow does not overstep the capacity defined by the maximum flow according to the fundamental diagram.

Subfields: Control and Systems Engineering, Ocean Engineering, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7d7562522dd2547ac24b49a3a73f79b55a5d298c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Control and Systems Engineering

1. Armin Seyfried
2. Wolfram Klingsch
3. Jun Zhang
4. Andreas Schadschneider

In Ocean Engineering

1. Armin Seyfried
2. Wolfram Klingsch
3. Andreas Schadschneider
4. Jun Zhang
5. Milad Haghani
6. Dirk Helbing

In Transportation

1. Armin Seyfried
2. Wolfram Klingsch
3. Andreas Schadschneider
4. Milad Haghani

Citations in the corpus

• Transitions in pedestrian fundamental diagrams of straight corridors and T-junctions (2011, background): “In addition, the small number of available datasets show surprisingly large differences [7, 8].”
• Panic, Irrationality, and Herding: Three Ambiguous Terms in Crowd Dynamics Research (2019, background): “Such disclaimers often appear in wordings such as: These experiments were conducted under nonpanic conditions [2], or the influence of panic has been excluded from the experiment/model [3, 4].”
• Methods for measuring pedestrian density, flow, speed and direction with minimal scatter (2009, unknown): “Up to now the experimental data base is insufficient and contradictory [3,6,7] and thus asks for additional experimental studies as well as improved measurement methods.”