ABSTRACT

In response to the repetitive and cluttered traffic signs in the operating environment inside the subway stations, the guidance signs sometimes fail to provide direction and path transition instructions to pedestrians, which reduces the pedestrian passage rate and even causes congestion and trampling during the peak passenger flow. Based on group behavior theory, this paper investigates the microscopic behavior of pedestrians in subway stations, aiming to establish the changing laws of pedestrian behavior characteristics in the subway stations. By conducting field-tracking tests and tracking more than 600 random samples, the changing laws of pedestrian flow in different paths and different periods are obtained. The research results show that (1) pedestrians' speed varies in different areas of the station; among them, pedestrians' walking speed varies in different types of passages, and pedestrians' walking speed is higher in closed passages; (2) when the pedestrian density is small, pedestrians walk in a free-flow state at the desired speed, and as the pedestrian density increases, the pedestrian speed shows a pattern of increase followed by decreasing.