Characterisation and modelling of pedestrian flows in hospital and academic environments

Abstract

This paper examined pedestrian characteristics in two urban facilities namely a teaching hospital and a university campus. The aim was to determine if pedestrian flow features in these facilities differed from those in downtown areas. The objectives were to measure pedestrian flow rates and model their walking behaviour. Eleven sites located within these facilities were selected for study. The results indicated that the male walked faster than the female in the university campus while the female was faster in the hospital environment. Also the university campus saw more groups of pedestrians in the traffic mix than was the case in the hospital environment where 93% of the pedestrians were in single files. The male walked faster than the female by 7% in the university environment while the female were faster by 4% in the hospital environment. The modelling effort showed that the free walking speed in the university environment was 68.052 m/min with a critical density of 3.15 ped/m2. That of the hospital environment was 75.099 m/min and a critical density of 4.36 ped/m2. Since the speed-density relationships for the two facilities revealed a highly randomized plot, the data was fit to the normal distribution and pdf and cdf were used to assess the quality of the flow. For the university environment the results showed that 15% of the combined pedestrians walked below 56.88 m/min while 50% of the pedestrians walked below 66.67m/min and 85% walked below 72.50 m/min. Similarly, the results of the hospital environment showed that 15th percentile of the combined pedestrians walked below 69.75 m/min. The median speed of pedestrians was 72.50 m/min while 85% of the pedestrians walked below 75.25 m/min. In both cases, the 15 percentile speeds were 14% and 18.5% less than the median speeds in both facilities respectively. Thus flow breakdowns are unexpected in the two facilities.