Is Slowing Down Enough to Model Movement on Stairs?

Abstract

There are many well validated models of pedestrian movement on a flat surface. This is not the case for movement on stairs. Experiments show that pedestrians slow down when climbing or descending stairs. Hence, it is tempting to model movement on stairs by simply slowing down by a factor. But this would imply that, other than being slower, motion on stairs mirrors motion in the plane. Is that assumption justified? We conduct field observations that reveal similarities but also significant differences. Thus we argue that modeling movement on stairs by slowing down free-flow velocities may be an acceptable first shot. True microscopic behavior, however, like treading from step to step and keeping to a straight line instead of trying to overtake can only be captured by a dedicated model. We present an extension to the Optimal Steps Model that achieves this.