Asymmetric pedestrian dynamics on a staircase landing from continuous measurements

TL;DR

This study uses year-long Kinect-based measurements to analyze pedestrian movement asymmetries on a staircase landing, revealing detailed dynamics for solo and paired pedestrians in real-life conditions.

Contribution

It provides the first extensive real-world dataset of pedestrian trajectories on a staircase landing, highlighting asymmetries in walking behavior and velocity in different directions and flow conditions.

Findings

Asymmetric walking speeds in ascending vs. descending directions

Distinct movement patterns for solo pedestrians and couples

Quantitative analysis of pedestrian flow and velocity distributions

Abstract

We investigate via extensive experimental data the dynamics of pedestrians walking in a corridor-shaped landing in a building at Eindhoven University of Technology. With year-long automatic measurements employing a Microsoft KinectTM 3D-range sensor and ad hoc tracking techniques, we acquired few hundreds of thousands pedestrian trajectories in real-life conditions. Here we discuss the asymmetric features of the dynamics in the two walking directions with respect to the flights of stairs (i.e. ascending or descending). We provide a detailed analysis of position and speed fields for the cases of pedestrians walking alone undisturbed and for couple of pedestrians in counter-flow. Then, we show average walking velocities exploring all the observed combinations in terms of numbers of pedestrians and walking directions.