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Double-Deck Rail Car Egress Experiment: Microscopic Analysis of Pedestrian Time Headways
Abstract
Based on the data from two double-deck rail car egress experiments, presented project aims to estimate the effects of various parameters on the evacuation time. This paper focuses on a microscopic analysis of the time headways showing that several headway-based statistics may illustrate the macroscopic behavior as well as may explain observed phenomena. Applying this approach, we have concluded that the evacuation movement may be decomposed into two phases with different performance and that the efficiency of evacuation is given by their proportion. Moreover, we have observed that the total evacuation time is affected mainly by the frequency of extremely large headways, i.e. the performance significantly depends on few slowest persons.
... The additional times were obtained using linear extrapolation of the egress times for the last 7 passengers in the HOM group, following the assumption that 4 additional passengers would have exited in a similar manner as the 7 participants before them. This assumption was supported by time-headway analyses [46]. This method of adding artificial times to the HOM group was preferred over the option of discarding four observations from the HET group, because in every trial, participants were egressing in different orders. ...
Passenger trains represent a challenging environment in emergencies, with specific evacuation conditions resulting from the typical layout and interior design inherent to public transportation vehicles. This paper describes a dataset obtained in a full-scale controlled experiment emulating the emergency evacuation of a double-deck electric unit railcar carried out in Prague in 2018. 15 evacuation trials involving 91 participants were conducted under various evacuation scenarios considering different compositions of passenger crowd, exit widths, and exit types (e.g. egress to a high platform, to an open rail line using stairs, and a 750 mm jump without any supporting equipment). The study's main goals were to collect experimental data on the movement conditions in the railcar and to study the impact of various boundary conditions on evacuation process and total evacuation time. Movement characteristics (exit flows, speeds) and human behaviour (pre-movement activities, exiting behaviours) were also analysed. The data obtained was used to validate and adjust a Pathfinder model to capture important aspects of evacuation from the railcar. Furthermore, a series of simulations using this model was performed to provide sensitivity analysis of the influence of crowd composition, exit width, and exit type on total evacuation time. As a key finding, we can conclude that for the case of a standard exit path (platform or stairs) the width of the main exit had the greatest impact on total evacuation time, however, crowd composition played the prevailing role in evacuation scenarios involving a jump.
The authors explore the problem of ensuring fire safety and assessing the expected risk to life in double-deck trains. Statistical data of fires on railway transport in Russia are presented, their main causes are revealed. A method for assessing expected risk to life in double-deck trains is proposed. The results of the assessment can be used in the future to justify the adoption of additional measures aimed at reducing the level of fire hazard for people in double-decker trains.
Passenger trains represent a challenging environment in emergencies, with specific evacuation conditions resulting from the typical layout and interior design inherent to public transportation vehicles. This paper describes a dataset obtained in a full-scale controlled experiment emulating the emergency evacuation of a double-deck electric unit railcar carried out in Prague in 2018. 15 evacuation trials involving 91 participants were conducted under various evacuation scenarios considering different compositions of passenger crowd, exit widths, and exit types (egress to a high platform, to an open rail line using stairs, and a 750 mm jump without any supporting equipment). The study’s main goals were to collect experimental data on the movement conditions in the railcar and to study the impact of various boundary conditions on evacuation process and total evacuation time. Movement characteristics (exit flows, speeds) and human behaviour (pre-movement activities, exiting behaviours) were also analysed. The data obtained was used to validate and adjust a Pathfinder model to capture important aspects of evacuation from the railcar. Furthermore, a series of simulations using this model was performed to provide sensitivity analysis of the influence of crowd composition, exit width, and exit type on total evacuation time. As a key finding, we can conclude that for the case of a standard exit path (platform or stairs) the width of the main exit had the greatest impact on total evacuation time, however, crowd composition played the prevailing role in evacuation scenarios involving a jump.
For the proper understanding and modelling of pedestrian dynamics, reliable empirical data is necessary for analysis and verification. This paper discusses laboratory experiments at T-junctions: the setup, the extraction of the trajectories of the pedestrians and the analysis of the resulting data. Such experiments give us the opportunity to selectively analyse parameters independent of undesired influences and adjust them to high densities seldom seen in field studies. For the T-junction the density inside the junction has been varied and analysed. Two strategies for the time-efficient automatic extraction of accurate pedestrian trajectories from stereo recordings are presented. One strategy uses marker for detection and the other one based on a perspective depth field. From these trajectories the fundamental diagram of T-junction flow is analysed, the density, velocity and specific flow profiles are obtained using the Voronoi method.
This contribution provides microscopic experimental study of pedestrian motion in front of the bottleneck. The identification of individual pedestrians in variety of experiments enables to explain the high variance of travel time by the heterogeneity of the crowd. Some pedestrians are able to push effectively through the crowd, some get trapped in the crowd for significantly longer time. This ability to push through the crowd is associated with a slope of individual linear model of the dependency of travel time on the number of pedestrians in front of the bottleneck. Further detailed study of the origin of such ability is studied by means of the route choice, i.e., strategy whether to walk around the crowd or to walk directly through it. The study reveals that the ability to push through the crowd is a combination of aggressiveness in conflicts and willingness to overtake the crowd.
The aim of the article is to give a more detailed insight into territorial social forces acting between pedestrians by means of headway distribution and spectral rigidity. Probabilistic distribution of time headways between consecutive pedestrians is studied theoretically and experimentally. Several original experiments/empirical observations are presented and compared to data obtained from previously published experiments. The study is restricted to an unidirectional one-lane motion where overtaking is forbidden.
The main stress is put on natural choices of mutual interaction represented by logarithmic and hyperbolic potentials leading to gamma and generalized inverse Gaussian distribution respectively. We show that the time headway distribution does not sufficiently reflect the differences between such distributions. The tools related to spectral rigidity and compressibility are chosen instead so as to predict the territorial social forces more accurately. Surprisingly, pedestrian flow seems to show a higher level of synchronization (lower compressibility) than vehicular flow.
Including in total 135 participants in the ages 19-69 years (recruited from the general public), an unannounced full-scale field evacuation experiment was performed in the Stockholm underground metro system on the night between October 17 and 18, 2014. The purpose was to collect data on the flow rate of people in train exits during the evacuation of a train in a tunnel and on the walking speed of people when moving long distances on an uneven surface in a tunnel, and to study exit choice and behaviour during an evacuation. Consequently, the experiment involved the evacuation of a rail car (a Bombardier C20 train) in a tunnel as well as the subsequent evacuation of the tunnel itself; the latter meant that the participants either could evacuate to the closest station (~400 m) or to an available emergency exit (~200 m). Among other things, the experiment demonstrated that the averaged flow rates of people in the train exits varied between 0.19 p/s and 0.22 p/s (0.14-0.16 p/m s when considering the train exit width of 1.4 m) and that the averaged walking speeds in the tunnel varied between 1.1 m/s and 1.2 m/s (no smoke present). Furthermore, all 135 participants found and used the available emergency exit, which had been equipped with a technical system consisting of a loudspeaker that broadcasted a combined alarm signal and a pre-recorded voice message.
The paper investigates the evacuation of passengers from a metro train in a simulated tunnel situation with a focus on the
close geometry of the passage between the metro cars and the tunnel walls. Furthermore trains for underground transportation
usually have a high floor which means that people have to overcome a height of 1.0 to 1.2 m to the surrounding ground adopting
different types of exiting strategies. In addition people, who try to leave the train through one of the doors onto the escape
route, and people who pass this door outside the train at the same time, have to interfere and react to each other in some
way. Due to those risks two full-scale evacuation experiments were conducted in a newly released metro train presently used
by the Vienna Transport Authorities, in which participants were subjected to the close geometry of a tunnel situation and
a high floor evacuation.
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