Experimental study of pedestrian flow mixed with wheelchair users through funnel-shaped bottlenecks
Hongliang Pan, Jun Zhang, Weiguo Song
Abstract
Abstract With the aging of the world’s population and the resulting increase of disabilities, the characteristics of pedestrian flow mixed with wheelchair users has been paid more and more attention. In this study, experiments in funnel-shaped bottlenecks were performed to study the impact of the bottleneck shape and the ratio of wheelchair users on the crowd dynamics. It is found that the increase in wheelchairs in the crowd leads to lower moving efficiency and greater congestion impacting the escape time, time-space relationship and time headway. Under low mixing ratios (<2.35%), less congestion occurred in the 45° bottleneck among the four tested angles (0°, 15°, 30°, 45°). The average speeds of the wheelchair users are the fastest in 45° bottleneck (0.310 ± 0.097 m s −1 ) until the mixing ratio becomes 7.05%. However, the advantage of the angle disappears when the mixing ratio gets higher. The findings in this study are meaningful for the guidance of pedestrian evacuation through bottlenecks with the presence of wheelchair users.