Modelling the pedestrian’s willingness to walk on the subway platform : a novel approach to analyze in-vehicle crowd congestion

Abstract

A common behavior pattern observed on subway platforms is that pedestrians walk downstairs from the escalator and choose a door to wait for a rail train. Interestingly, pedestrians often walk to farther doors rather than the nearest one to the escalator. This paper proposes a new concept, called willingness to walk (WTW), to describe pedestrians' behavioral characteristics, including their psychological tendency to stay in their original queue or to walk to farther queues. Two regression models are proposed to quantitatively measure WTW, both of which are calibrated using an inequality-based least square method. Observation data are collected through field investigation and simulation software. The calibration results confirm the existence of WTW. The proposed method is then applied to analyze the distribution of waiting passengers on the platform and the level of in-vehicle crowding. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed WTW models can reliably approximate the actual passenger load in carriages.