Evacuation of a High Floor Metro Train in a Tunnel Situation: Experimental Findings

Abstract

The paper investigates the evacuation of passengers from a metro train in a simulated tunnel situation with a focus on the close geometry of the passage between the metro cars and the tunnel walls. Furthermore trains for underground transportation usually have a high floor which means that people have to overcome a height of 1.0 to 1.2 m to the surrounding ground adopting different types of exiting strategies. In addition people, who try to leave the train through one of the doors onto the escape route, and people who pass this door outside the train at the same time, have to interfere and react to each other in some way. Due to those risks two full-scale evacuation experiments were conducted in a newly released metro train presently used by the Vienna Transport Authorities, in which participants were subjected to the close geometry of a tunnel situation and a high floor evacuation.