Influence of individual factors on fundamental diagrams of pedestrians

TL;DR

This study investigates how individual factors like height, age, and gender influence pedestrian movement, revealing that unmeasured personal characteristics significantly affect walking speed beyond measurable traits.

Contribution

It introduces the use of individual fundamental diagrams and compares linear and mixed models to analyze personal effects on pedestrian speed.

Findings

Age and height are strongly correlated, allowing age to be ignored.

Gender has a weak effect on pedestrian speed.

Mixed models outperform fixed-effects models in capturing individual variability.

Abstract

In recent years, numerous studies have been published dealing with the effect of individual characteristics of pedestrians on the fundamental diagram. These studies compared cumulative data on individuals in a group homogeneous in terms of one human factor such as age but heterogeneous in terms of other factors for instance gender. In order to examine the effect of all determined as well as undetermined human factors, individual fundamental diagrams are introduced and analyzed using multiple linear regression. A single-file school experiment with students of different age, gender, and height is therefore considered. Single individuals appearing in different runs are analyzed to study the effect of human factors such as height, age and gender and all other unknown individual effects such as motivation or attention to the individual speed. The analysis shows that for students age and height are strongly correlated and, consequently, age can be ignored. Furthermore, the study shows that gender has a weak effect and other nonmeasurable individual characteristics have a stronger effect than height. In a further step, a mixed model is used as well as the multiple linear model. Here, it is shown that the mixed model that considers all other unknown individual effects of each person as a random factor is preferable to the model where the individual speed only depends on the variables of headway, height, and all other unknown individual effects as fixed factors.