Estimating Pedestrian Movement Characteristics for Crowd Control at Public Transport Facilities: A Case Study

Capacities of doors, staircases and other bottlenecks are a key aspect in the design of infrastructures for public transport. Especially major events like soccer games and concerts may lead to large crowds which need to be accommodated, while at the same time potential safety hazards like overcrowding must be avoided. The bottleneck capacities limit the capacities of the whole system and control the potential of high crowd densities on critical elements such as the platforms. We present an approach to estimate the maximum and effective capacity of key bottleneck elements based on controlled experiments and real world data sets of pedestrian movements for a subway station next to the main soccer stadium in Vienna. The focus is the fundamental diagram revealing both the maximal capacity as well as the effective capacity in terms of pedestrian flow rates. We present two controlled experiments and results based on real world data obtained during the European Soccer Championship (UEFA EURO 2008TM).