Human movement behaviour in South African railway stations: implications for design

Abstract

Paper presented at the 30th Annual Southern African Transport Conference 11-14 July 2011 "Africa on the Move", CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa.

The results of a video-based observational study aimed at exploring pedestrian movement behaviour within South African railway station environments is presented, in particular the macroscopic fundamental relationships of speed, density and flow incorporating the ways in which these variables might be in.fluenced by the various personal, situational, and environmental factors that characterise the context in which pedestrians move. The movement trajectories of 24410 pedestrians were investigated in a video-based observational study of three infrastructure environments viz. platforms, stairs and skywalks at Maitland and Bonteheuwel stations in Cape Town, South Africa. Assessment of boarding and alighting rates of 7426 passengers was also observed at these stations. Age, gender, body size, mobility, group size, time of day, and location were contributory attributes observed with each dataset. Tracking pedestrians was done via the use of an in-house developed "video annotator" software tool, to enable an operator to manually mark pedestrians on video files. The marks form a track for each pedestrian, and all the tracks on a video file are recorded into a corresponding data text file. The operator can further document each tracked pedestrian with additional attributes, such as gender, age, type of luggage carried, impairmentldisability, destination, activity, or any other recognisable criterion we may want to study. The objective of the study was the determination of various walking speed histograms and the development of macroscopic fundamental relationships that can be applied to calibrate microscopic pedestrian models for local conditions.