Abstract
In this paper, we present a pedestrian single-file movement experiment that directly captures the characteristics of the interacting pedestrians’ continuous stepping behaviors. We find that the relationship between step length (duration) and spatial headway exhibits piecewise linear behavior: It first increases linearly as the headway increases and then remains constant when the headway exceeds 1.20 m (0.71 m). Three different regimes are observed and defined on the basis of their relationships. The continuous small-step phenomena are found in a strongly constrained regime. We reveal that the relationship between the step duration and the step velocity is nonmonotonous and that the longest duration is seen at a velocity of 1.35 m/s, whereas the relationship between the step length and the step velocity is monotonous and can be well represented by a quartic function. Furthermore, we show that the dependency of the ratio between head displacement and foot displacement in a step on the headway is a piecewise linear relationship. We were interested to find that the ratio is less (greater) than 0.5 when the headway is less (greater) than 1 m. This finding reveals the backward- (forward-) deviating phenomena of the body and can be used to indirectly interpret the differences in some of the results of this paper and previous studies. Finally, we show that step synchronization (asynchronization) is most likely to occur at a headway of 0.76 m (0.51 m). These interesting findings greatly deepen our understanding of basic human stepping behavior.
6 More- Received 24 September 2018
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.98.062311
©2018 American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Synopsis
How Walkers Avoid Collisions
Published 14 December 2018
Observations of large numbers of pedestrians in two new studies offer insights into how humans avoid bumping into each other.
See more in Physics