Contrastive study on the single-file pedestrian movement of the elderly and other age groups

TL;DR

This study empirically compares elderly and other age groups in single-file pedestrian movement, revealing how crowd composition and familiarity influence dynamics and identifying three movement regimes with implications for elderly-friendly infrastructure.

Contribution

It provides new empirical data on elderly pedestrian behavior at high densities, highlighting factors beyond age that affect movement and proposing a model for elderly-friendly facility design.

Findings

Elderly are more sensitive to spatial headway in constrained regimes.

Three distinct regimes in headway-speed relationship are confirmed.

Elderly require longer headways during motion transitions.

Abstract

The worldwide population is aging and countries are facing ongoing challenges in improving the safety of elderly pedestrians. In this work, single-file movement of the elderly are experimentally compared with that of different age groups. The findings indicates that the age is not the only factor influencing the pedestrian dynamics but the heterogeneity of the crowd composition and the familiarity among neighboring pedestrians also have significant effects. The existence of three regimes in the relationship between headway and speed is confirmed. In the strong constrained regime, the slope of the relationship between headway and speed of the elderly is bigger than that of the young, which means that the elders are more sensitive to the spatial headway than the young when adapting the speeds. However, the difference of the slopes in the weakly constrained regime is small, which indicates a weak dependency between age and the adaption time. The elderly need longer headway during the transformation of the motion state. Besides, the 'active cease' behavior of pedestrians, which is explained with the least effort principle, is observed in the experiment. The findings offer empirical data of the elderly under high densities and can be useful for the improvement of the pedestrian modelling and the construction of elderly friendly facilities.