Experimental study of pedestrian flow mixed with wheelchair users through funnel-shaped bottlenecks

TL;DR

This study experimentally investigates how wheelchair users affect pedestrian flow through funnel-shaped bottlenecks, revealing impacts on efficiency, congestion, and optimal bottleneck angles at different mixing ratios.

Contribution

It provides new insights into pedestrian dynamics involving wheelchair users and evaluates the influence of bottleneck shape and mixing ratio on flow efficiency.

Findings

Higher wheelchair ratios worsen flow efficiency and increase congestion.

Less congestion occurs at low mixing ratios (<2.35%) in 45° bottlenecks.

Wheelchair speeds are fastest in 45° bottlenecks at low mixing ratios.

Abstract

With the increase of the elderly and disabled in the world, the characteristics of pedestrian flow mixed with wheelchair users has being paid more and more attention. In this study, experiments in funnel-shaped bottlenecks were performed to study the impact of bottleneck shape and the ratio of wheelchair users on the crowd dynamics. It is found that the increase of wheelchairs in the crowd obviously leads to worse moving efficiency and congestion from the escape time, time-space relationship and time headway. Under low mixing ratios (<2.35%), less congestion occurred in the 45{\deg} bottleneck among the four tested angles (0{\deg}, 15{\deg}, 30{\deg}, 45{\deg}). The average speeds of wheelchair users is the fastest in 45 {\deg} bottleneck (0.310m/s) until the mixing ratio arrives at 7.05%. However, the advantage of the angle disappears when the mixing ratio gets higher. The findings in this study is meaningful for the guidance of pedestrian evacuation through bottlenecks with the presence of wheelchair users.