Investigating the effect of expected travel distance on individual descent speed in the stairwell with super long distance

TL;DR

This study investigates how the expected evacuation distance influences individual descent speed in tall buildings, revealing that longer expected distances slow pedestrians and that gender and physiological factors also affect evacuation speed.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence linking expected evacuation distance to descent speed and explores gender and physiological differences during evacuation in high-rise buildings.

Findings

Increased expected evacuation distance decreases pedestrian speed.

Male pedestrians' speed decreases more than females with longer distances.

Correlation found between heart rate and evacuation speed.

Abstract

Currently, there is an increasing number of super high-rise buildings in urban cities, the issue of evacuation in emergencies from such buildings comes to the fore. An evacuation experiment was carried out by our group in Shanghai Tower, it was found that the evacuation speed of pedestrians evacuated from the 126th floor was always slower than that of those from the 117th floor. Therefore, we propose a hypothesis that the expected evacuation distance will affect pedestrians' movement speed. In order to verify our conjecture, we conduct an experiment in a 12-story office building, that is, to study whether there would be an influence and what kind of influence would be caused on speed by setting the evacuation distance for participants in advance. According to the results, we find that with the increase of expected evacuation distance, the movement speed of pedestrians will decrease, which confirms our hypothesis. At the same time, we give the relation between the increase rate of evacuation distance and the decrease rate of speed. It also can be found that with the increase of expected evacuation distance, the speed decrease rate of the male is greater than that for female. In addition, we study the effects of actual evacuation distance, gender, BMI on evacuation speed. Finally, we obtain the correlation between heart rate and speed during evacuation. The results in this paper are beneficial to the study of pedestrian evacuation in super high-rise buildings.