Understanding Pedestrian Crowd Merging Behavior

Abstract

Different behaviors of pedestrian under complex situations such as turning and crossing have been investigated in the past. However, few studies considered the behaviors of pedestrians in merging areas despite the fact that this situation is very common in built environment such as exit points of railway stations and stadium. Notwithstanding of the importance of this phenomenon in pedestrian movements in particular due to creating bottleneck areas, the existing research on merging area is limited to T-junctions or staircases. This study investigates the merging behaviors of pedestrians under different scenarios such as various angles and pedestrian speed. The outcome of this research provides an insight into the understanding of crowd behaviors in merging areas.