Modelling passenger flows in public transport facilities

This thesis describes the developement of a new type of simulation tool for the assessment of designs of public transport facilities (stations, airports) and other public spaces with intensive pedestrian flows. Since the available space for such facilities is increasingly under pressure, the space efficiency and walking comfort is becoming more and more important. The developed simulation tool provides designers and decision-makers with all kinds of quantitative information about the expected quality of pedestrian (traffic) flows such as travel times, waiting times, queue building, preferred routes, visits to shops and counters, etc. This information is very useful in comparing multiple designs as well as to optimise a specific design. The simulation model also is meant to improve schedules of public transport services at interchange nodes by minimising passenger transfer times. To that end, special attention is paid to the modelling of boarding and alighting processes. New insights about walking have been gained by performing unique large-scale laboratory experiments in which large groups of subjects were assigned various walking tasks, such as high volume crossing flows and walking through bottlenecks until flow breaks down. Specific walking and route choice models are developed using observations of passengers on platforms (such as in Delft) and route choice through the station (such as in Delft and Breda). The tool has proven its value in the analysis of new designs of the future Rotterdam Central Station and performance tests of the new Breskens-Vlissingen ferry terminals.Trai

Challenges in modeling bicycle flow

Transport & PlanningCivil Engineering and Geoscience

Automatic fitting procedure for the fundamental diagram

The fundamental diagram of a road, including free flow capacity and queue discharge rate, is very important for traffic engineering purposes. In the real word, most traffic measurements come from stationary loop detectors. This paper proposes a method to fit Wu’s fundamental diagram to loop detector data. Wu’s fundamental diagram is characterised by five parameters, being the free flow speed, wave speed, free flow capacity, queue discharge rate and jam density. The fits appear to be not very sensitive to the right value for the wave speed or the free flow speed. The proposed method therefore entails fixing these two parameters. The method consists of two steps. We first use a triangular fundamental diagram to separate the congested branch from the free flow branch. Then, the remaining three parameters of Wu’s fundamental diagram are fitted on each of the branches using a least square fit. This method is shown to be robust for cases tested in real life, and hence very noisy, data.Transport and PlanningCivil Engineering and Geoscience

Capacity of doors during evacuation conditions

In this paper, we show how the capacity of evacuation doors is affected by the evacuation door width, population composition, the presence of an open door and evacuation conditions. For this, laboratory experiments have been performed. Varying door opening widths showed that only the experiment with the widest door opening (275 cm) resulted in a capacity lower than the threshold capacity from the design guidelines (2.25 P/m/s). The average observed capacities are for all widths lowest for the lowest stress level and highest for the highest stress level. The population with a greater part of children has the highest capacity, while the lowest capacity is, as expected, found for the experiment with 5% disabled participants. The presence of a door opened in the escape direction in an angle of 90 degrees for a door opening of 85 cm results in a 20% capacity reduction.Transport and PlanningCivil Engineering and Geoscience

Bicycle headway modeling and its applications

Little is known about the microscopic operations of bicycle traffic. This lack of knowledge makes it difficult to design and to analyze facilities that are also used by cyclists, as well as to assess their efficiency and safety. This paper puts forward a novel composite headway model for bicycle flows. On the basis of a working definition of a bicycle headway, the model assumes that the headway is the sum of the so-called empty zone (i.e., the minimum headway that a cyclist has with respect to the bicycle he or she is following) and the free headway (i.e., the additional headway that cyclists maintain when they are not following). Both headways are stochastic variables, given the high degree of heterogeneity in cyclists’ behavior. Further, a distribution-free model estimation approach is put forward to make it possible to identify the distributions of the empty zone and the free headway without the need to specify their functional form first. The workings of the model and the estimation method are illustrated with the use of data collected at a busy intersection in the Netherlands.harvestTransport and Plannin

Controlled experiments to derive walking behaviour

Trai

Estimation of train dwell time at short stops based on track occupation event data

Train dwell time is one of the most unpredictable components of railway operations mainly due to the varying volumes of alighting and boarding passengers. For reliable estimations of train running times and route conflicts on main lines it is however necessary to obtain accurate estimations of dwell times at the intermediate stops on the main line, the so-called short stops. This is a big challenge for a more reliable, efficient and robust train operation. Previous research has shown that dwell time is highly dependent on the number of boarding and alighting passengers. However, the latter numbers are usually not available in real time. This paper discusses the possibility of a dwell time estimation model at short stops without passenger demand information, by means of a statistical analysis of track occupation data from the Netherlands. The analysis showed that the dwell times are best estimated for peak and off-peak hour separately. The peak hour dwell times are estimated using a linear regression model of train length, dwell times at previous stops and dwell times of the previous trains. The off-peak hour dwell times are estimated using a non-parametric regression model. There are two major advantages of the proposed estimation model. The model does not need passenger flow data which is usually impossible to know in real time in practice. Also, detailed parameters of rolling stock configuration and platform layout are not required, which eases implementation.Transport & PlanningCivil Engineering and Geoscience

Crowd movements during exceptional events

Transport & PlanningCivil Engineering and Geoscience

Trip chaining of bicycle and car commuters: An empirical analysis of detours to secondary activities

A largely overlooked mode choice factor of cycling is the mode-dependent capability of visiting several activity locations within a trip chain. Due to the bicycle’s limited reach in comparison to the car, this capability can be increased by urban environments that facilitate trip chaining by bicycle. In the present paper, we empirically study travel distances between activity locations that facilitate trip chaining by the example of Dutch commute tours. More precisely, we address the question of how much cyclists extend commute tour distances compared to car travellers to include a secondary activity. For this purpose, a Bayesian regression model is proposed to analyse the effects of travel mode, secondary activity type and a series of control variables such as age and time of the day on commute tour extensions. The model results propose that people make on average detours of 7.4 km by car and 1.3 km by bicycle. These values strongly differ depending on the type of secondary activity, gender, the distance of the home-work tour and the duration of the secondary activity. In addition, the comparison between car and bicycle travel revealed some behavioural peculiarities of the active modes, which have implications for bicycle-friendly urban planning and several transport-related concepts.Transport and PlanningTransport and Plannin

A methodology to calibrate pedestrian walker models using multiple objectives

The application of walker models to simulate real situations require accuracy in several traffic situations. One strategy to obtain a generic model is to calibrate the parameters in several situations using multiple-objective functions in the optimization process. In this paper, we propose a general methodology for calibration of walker models. This methodology is a generalisation of existing calibration procedures adapted to walker models. The fundamental aspect of the methodology is the use of several scenarios representing different calibration objectives. One of the advantages of the general methodology is that by applying it, the process of calibration helps understanding themodel and how to adjust it according to the intended application. As an example, the methodology is applied with synthetic generated trajectory data using the Nomad model to investigate the influence of the mathematical specifications of the objective functions and the flow configurations in the accuracy of estimations and significance of individual parameters.Transport & PlanningCivil Engineering and Geoscience