Uni- and bidirectional pedestrian flows through zigzag corridor in a tourism area: a field study

Nowadays, the famous tourist attractions are becoming more and more popular for people from all over the world. Thus, to ensure the safety of tourists is a tough task in such crowded area. The study of pedestrian’s characteristics in crowd movement is essential for safety management. In this article, both uni- and bidirectional observational experiments were conducted to quantitatively analyze the movement properties of pedestrians in a zigzag corridor which is located in a tourism area named Yuyuan business district in Shanghai. Several phenomena have been found during the tourists’ movement process: congestion at boundary, competing and bypassing behavior, and flow gap. As indicated by the transit time of pedestrians in both uni- and bidirectional scenarios, pedestrians in bidirectional pattern (>10 s) spend more time on going through the corridor than that in unidirectional one (<10 s). Besides, the fundamental diagrams in both uni- and bidirectional scenarios are significantly different from data in a controlled experiment, and obvious differences are observed within the density regime from 1.5 to 2.5 ped/m2 between the uni- and bidirectional scenarios. In addition, spatial distributions of density and velocity demonstrate that pedestrians would like to cluster at the boundary of straight corridors in both uni- and bidirectional scenarios. The results could enrich the database of fundamental diagrams, and then be used for model calibration by taking the actual situation into consideration in similar scenarios.