An Experimental Study on the Influence of Carrying Luggage to Bidirectional Pedestrian Flows

Abstract

With the improvement of people s quality of life, more and more people choose to travel during holidays to relieve the pressure of their work. Actually, people often need to carry luggage when they are getting around, particularly in the places where a large number of pedestrians such as subway stations, high-speed rail stations and the like are gathered. In order to explore the influence of carrying luggage in the bidirectional channels of subway and high-speed railway stations, this paper simulates a narrow passageway by blocking boards, and the experiment was carried out by 50 students on each side of the channel. The experiment proves that carrying luggage can lead to “unequal avoidance” and other phenomena which will never happen without luggage, and variables of pedestrian flows, density and velocity are also changing diversely. In addition, carrying luggage is more likely to appear on one side of the pedestrian bias behavior characteristics. Comparing all the conditions in the experiment, in which the velocity-density-time diagram has a period of “equilibrium time”, it can indicate that carrying luggage does not completely break the pedestrian movement rules.