An empirical study of crowd and pedestrian dynamics: Impact of different angle paths and groupings

An analytical study is proposed in this paper to investigate pedestrian crowd dynamics from a multi-disciplinary approach (i.e. traffic engineering and social science) focusing on the impact of environment physical features and social interaction on pedestrian movement dynamics in high-density situations on pedestrian movement dynamics in high density situations. Taking advantage of previous studies that highlighted the importance of turning movements of crowd during evacuations, we empirically investigated the impact of angled paths on orderly crowd egress flows. We also proposed to consider the social interaction among pedestrians, taking into account the presence of groups and their proxemics behavior while walking. Results of the flow rates level and walking speed of different scenarios studied in this work are presented (0°, 45°, 60° and 90° angle degrees). These showed that in high-density situations the walking speed of group members was lower compared to the singles within all scenarios studied, because of the need to stay close to own group members while walking. Likewise, the angle path with 60° degrees (compared to the scenario of corridor with 0° degrees) has a significant negative impact on both the flow rate and walking speed. These results could be of notable interest for all generic crowd models aiming at replicating crowd dynamics.