Role of Pedestrian Management in Evacuations

Planning and management of emergency evacuation have recently received much attention by the transportation research community, given the several recent major disasters in USA and elsewhere in the world. Much of this recent research has focused on the evacuation of drivers and passengers in vehicles. The movement of pedestrians from their walking origins, such as their assigned seats at a large event, to their walking destinations, such as their parked vehicles has largely been neglected. This pedestrian walking behavior has a direct and crucial impact on departure curves of the evacuating vehicles from the evacuation origins. This paper studies the role and a strategy of managing pedestrian traffic in emergency evacuations. A large-scale simulation model is developed for analyzing the performance of different evacuation strategies. Two scenarios are simulated and analyzed for evaluating a current pedestrian traffic management: the current strategy and a proposed new one which basically assigns evacuation gates and parking when an event ticket is purchased by or given to an attendee. Data from simulation runs indicate the proposed strategy improves several evacuation measures, such as event clearance times for various fractions of attendees.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ANB80T Emergency Evacuation.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Zhou, Zhuoyang
  • Wang, Ning
  • Mirchandani, Pitu
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC
  • Date: 2014-1-12 to 2014-1-16
• Date: 2014

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 18p
• Monograph Title: TRB 93rd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Emergency management; Evacuation; Pedestrian flow; Pedestrian traffic; Simulation; Special events; Stadiums
• Geographic Terms: Phoenix (Arizona)
• Subject Areas: Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Planning and Forecasting; Security and Emergencies; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01506609
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 14-1382
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 6 2014 4:50PM