The Influence of Wheelchair Users on Movement in a Bottleneck and a Corridor

Abstract

Emergency exits as bottlenecks in escape routes are important for designing traffic facilities. Particularly, the capacity estimation is a crucial performance criterion for assessment of pedestrians’ safety in built environments. For this reason, several studies were performed during the last decades which focus on the quantification of movement through corridors and bottlenecks. These studies were usually conducted with populations of homogeneous characteristics to reduce influencing variables and for reasons of practicability. Studies which consider heterogeneous characteristics in performance parameters are rarely available. In response and to reduce this lack of data a series of well-controlled large-scale movement studies considering pedestrians using different types of wheelchairs was carried out. As a result it is shown that the empirical relations ρ¯(v¯) and Js¯(ρ¯) are strongly affected by the presence of participants with visible disabilities (such as wheelchair users). We observed an adaption of the overall movement speeds to the movement speeds of participants using a wheelchair, even for low densities and free flow scenarios. Flow and movement speed are in a complex relation and do not depend on density only. In our studies, the concept of specific flow fits for the nondisabled subpopulation but it is not valid for scenario considering wheelchair users in the population.