Determining an influencing area affecting walking speed on footpath: A case study of a footpath in CBD Bangkok, Thailand

Intuitively, the crowd density in front of a pedestrian will affect his walking speed along a footpath. Nevertheless, the size of the influencing area affecting walking speed has rarely been scrutinized in the past. This study attempts to determine the distance in front of pedestrians that principally affects their walking speed under normal conditions, using a case study of a footpath in Bangkok. We recorded pedestrian activities along a test section of 20 m, with an effective walking width of 2.45 m in the morning and at noon. The morning dataset was extracted for analyzing various influencing distances, ranging from 1 to 20 m in front of the pedestrian. The bi-directional walking speed–pedestrian density models were developed, for each tested distance, using linear regression analysis. It was found that an influencing length in the range of 5–8 m yields the highest correlation coefficients. In the case of high density conditions, the walking speed of the equally-split flow (50:50) was found to be higher than other proportional flow analyzed. The finding has useful implications on the improvement of the walking simulations in mesoscopic models.