Mechanisms of passing through short exits for the elderly and young adults

The enhancement of the passage efficiency and the safety of pedestrians in public places have being paid increasing attentions. The increase of the elderly in crowds may impact the level of service of transportation systems due to the lower physical abilities. In this work, we focus on the movement characteristics through short bottlenecks for both the elderly and young adults experimentally. It is found that the elderly adopts the distance-oriented strategy when moving forward to an exit, while the young adults adopt the time-oriented strategy. These strategies lead to a 26% decline in the space utilization for the elderly and more waiting phase for the young adults. Besides, ellipse and teardrop-shape spatial distribution of the high-density regions are observed for the elderly and the young adults respectively. The time headway for two consecutive elders through the exit is 0.20 ± 0.06 s longer than that of the young adults. For a certain exit, the flow rate of the elderly stream is lower than that of the young stream. The capacity for the former is 0.51 p/(m s) lower than that for the latter. Consequently, the exit width for the elderly is suggested to be widened to 1.25b − 0.05 m from the width b for young adults. The results presented in this study can be used in management strategies of pedestrian flow and design of traffic facilities for the old people.