Contrastive study on the single-file pedestrian movement of the elderly and other age groups

Author: Ren, X. X., Zhang, J., Song, W. G.

Journal: Journal of Statistical Mechanics-Theory and Experiment

Keywords: traffic and crowd dynamics, model, Mechanics, Physics

Abstract:

The worldwide population is aging, and countries are facing ongoing challenges in improving the safety of elderly pedestrians. In this work, the single-file movement of the elderly is experimentally compared with that of different age groups. The findings indicate that the age is not the only factor influencing pedestrian dynamics. The heterogeneity of the crowd composition and familiarity among neighboring pedestrians also have significant effects. The existence of three regimes in the relationship between headway and speed is confirmed. In the strongly constrained regime, the slope of the relationship between the headway and speed of the elderly is bigger than that of the young, which means that the elderly are more sensitive to the spatial headway than the young when adapting their speeds. However, the difference of the slopes in the weakly constrained regime is small, which indicates a weak dependency between age and the adaption time. The elderly need a longer headway during the transformation of the motion state. Besides, the 'active cease' behavior of pedestrians, which is explained with the least effort principle, is observed in the experiment. The findings offer empirical data of the elderly under high densities and can be useful for the improvement of the pedestrian modelling and the construction of elderly friendly facilities.