Go left or right? Explore the side preference behavior with circle antipode experiments

TL;DR

This study investigates pedestrian side preference behavior in circle antipode experiments, revealing a dominant right-side preference unaffected by personal traits, and introduces a Voronoi diagram-based model to simulate this behavior realistically.

Contribution

The paper provides empirical evidence of a dominant right-side preference in pedestrians and develops a novel Voronoi diagram-based model to simulate realistic side preference behaviors.

Findings

Approximately 70% prefer the right side.

Handedness, gender, and height have no significant impact.

The model accurately reproduces observed side preference behaviors.

Abstract

Side preference is a critical behavior in conflict handling, and here the behavior is investigated with pedestrian trajectories in circle antipode experiments that own both conflicting and symmetrical participant situations. In the series of experiments, more participants(around 70\%) prefer to walk on the right side, and the statistical analyses reveal that factors such as handedness, gender, and height have no significant impacts. Further investigations show that most pedestrians actually make the side choices at the very beginning, and empirical results suggest that selecting the dominate side preference (right side in our experiments) can benefit the individual movement efficiency. To reflect the realistic side preference characteristics in simulations, a Voronoi diagram based model is introduced as well as a side preference parameter with normal distribution is formulated and calibrated. Further simulations prove that the modified model is able to reproduce realistic side preference behaviors in circle antipode experiments and other common situations.