Passenger Flows in Underground Railway Stations and Platforms, MTI Report 12-43

Urban rail systems are designed to carry large volumes of people into and out of major activity centers. As a result, the stations at these major activity centers are often crowded with boarding and alighting passengers, resulting in passenger inconvenience, delays, and at times danger. This study examines the planning and analysis of station passenger queuing and flows to offer rail transit station designers and transit system operators guidance on how to best accommodate and manage their rail passengers. The objectives of the study are to: 1) Understand the particular infrastructural, operational, behavioral, and spatial factors that affect and may constrain passenger queuing and flows in different types of rail transit stations; 2) Identify, compare, and evaluate practices for efficient, expedient, and safe passenger flows in different types of station environments and during typical (rush hour) and atypical (evacuations, station maintenance/ refurbishment) situations; and 3) Compile short-, medium-, and long-term recommendations for optimizing passenger flows in different station environments

Key challenges in agent-based modelling for geo-spatial simulation

Agent-based modelling (ABM) is fast becoming the dominant paradigm in social simulation due primarily to a worldview that suggests that complex systems emerge from the bottom-up, are highly decentralised, and are composed of a multitude of heterogeneous objects called agents. These agents act with some purpose and their interaction, usually through time and space, generates emergent order, often at higher levels than those at which such agents operate. ABM however raises as many challenges as it seeks to resolve. It is the purpose of this paper to catalogue these challenges and to illustrate them using three somewhat different agent-based models applied to city systems. The seven challenges we pose involve: the purpose for which the model is built, the extent to which the model is rooted in independent theory, the extent to which the model can be replicated, the ways the model might be verified, calibrated and validated, the way model dynamics are represented in terms of agent interactions, the extent to which the model is operational, and the way the model can be communicated and shared with others. Once catalogued, we then illustrate these challenges with a pedestrian model for emergency evacuation in central London, a hypothetical model of residential segregation tuned to London data which elaborates the standard Schelling (1971) model, and an agent-based residential location built according to spatial interactions principles, calibrated to trip data for Greater London. The ambiguities posed by this new style of modelling are drawn out as conclusions

Performance Measures to Assess Resiliency and Efficiency of Transit Systems

Transit agencies are interested in assessing the short-, mid-, and long-term performance of infrastructure with the objective of enhancing resiliency and efficiency. This report addresses three distinct aspects of New Jersey’s Transit System: 1) resiliency of bridge infrastructure, 2) resiliency of public transit systems, and 3) efficiency of transit systems with an emphasis on paratransit service. This project proposed a conceptual framework to assess the performance and resiliency for bridge structures in a transit network before and after disasters utilizing structural health monitoring (SHM), finite element (FE) modeling and remote sensing using Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR). The public transit systems in NY/NJ were analyzed based on their vulnerability, resiliency, and efficiency in recovery following a major natural disaster

Modelling evacuation using escalators: a London Underground dataset

This paper presents a brief analysis of an escalator human factors dataset collected in a London Underground (subway) station in England. The data analysis highlights and quantifies a variety of escalator human factors. Using the buildingEXODUS evacuation software, a series of evacuation scenarios of a hypothetical underground station are then presented. The simulation results demonstrate that escalator strategies and associated human factors can have a considerably influence upon an evacuation compared to using stairs alone

Bikesharing and Bicycle Safety

The growth of bikesharing in the United States has had a transformative impact on urban transportation. Major cities have established large bikesharing systems, including Boston, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, New York City, Salt Lake City, the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Washington DC, and others. These systems began operating as early as 2010, and no fatalities have occurred within the US as of this writing. However, three have happened in North America—two in Canada and one in Mexico. Bikesharing has some qualities that appear inherently unsafe for bicyclists. Most prominently, helmet usage is documented to be quite low in most regions. Bikesharing is also used by irregular bicyclists who are less familiar with the local terrain. In this study, researchers take a closer look at bikesharing safety from qualitative and quantitative perspectives. Through a series of four focus groups, they discussed bikesharing usage and safety with bikesharing members and nonmembers in the Bay Area. They further engaged experts nationwide from a variety of fields to evaluate their opinions and perspectives on bikesharing and safety. Finally, researchers conducted an analysis of bicycle and bikesharing activity data, as well as bicycle and bikesharing collisions to evaluate injury rates associated with bikesharing when compared with benchmarks of personal bicycling. The data analysis found that collision and injury rates for bikesharing are lower than previously computed rates for personal bicycling. Experts and focus group participants independently pointed to bikesharing rider behavior and bikesharing bicycle design as possible factors. In particular, bikesharing bicycles are generally designed in ways that promote stability and limited speeds, which mitigate the conditions that contribute to collisions. Data analysis also explored whether there was evidence of a “safety in numbers benefit” that resulted from bikesharing activity. However, no significant impact from bikesharing activity on broader bicycle collisions could be found within the regions in which they operate. Discussion and recommendations are presented in the conclusion

Understanding Urban Mobility and Pedestrian Movement

Urban environments continue to expand and mutate, both in terms of size of urban area and number of people commuting daily as well as the number of options for personal mobility. City layouts and infrastructure also change constantly, subject to both short-term and long-term imperatives. Transportation networks have attracted particular attention in recent years, due to efforts to incorporate “green” options, enabling positive lifestyle choices such as walking or cycling commutes. In this chapter we explore the pedestrian viewpoint, aids to familiarity with and ease of navigation in the urban environment, and the impact of novel modes of individual transport (as options such as smart urban bicycles and electric scooters increasingly become the norm). We discuss principal factors influencing rapid transit to daily and leisure destinations, such as schools, offices, parks, and entertainment venues, but also those which facilitate rapid evacuation and movement of large crowds from these locations, characterized by high occupation density or throughput. The focus of the chapter is on understanding and representing pedestrian behavior through the agent-based modeling paradigm, allowing both large numbers of individual actions with active awareness of the environment to be simulated and pedestrian group movements to be modeled on real urban networks, together with congestion and evacuation pattern visualization

The discrete dynamics of small-scale spatial events: agent-based models of mobility in carnivals and street parades

Small-scale spatial events are situations in which elements or objects vary in such away that temporal dynamics is intrinsic to their representation and explanation. Someof the clearest examples involve local movement from conventional traffic modelingto disaster evacuation where congestion, crowding, panic, and related safety issue arekey features of such events. We propose that such events can be simulated using newvariants of pedestrian model, which embody ideas about how behavior emerges fromthe accumulated interactions between small-scale objects. We present a model inwhich the event space is first explored by agents using ?swarm intelligence?. Armedwith information about the space, agents then move in an unobstructed fashion to theevent. Congestion and problems over safety are then resolved through introducingcontrols in an iterative fashion and rerunning the model until a ?safe solution? isreached. The model has been developed to simulate the effect of changing the route ofthe Notting Hill Carnival, an annual event held in west central London over 2 days inAugust each year. One of the key issues in using such simulation is how the processof modeling interacts with those who manage and control the event. As such, thischanges the nature of the modeling problem from one where control and optimizationis external to the model to one where this is intrinsic to the simulation

Agent-based pedestrian modelling

When the focus of interest in geographical systems is at the very fine scale, at the level of streets and buildings for example, movement becomes central to simulations of how spatial activities are used and develop. Recent advances in computing power and the acquisition of fine scale digital data now mean that we are able to attempt to understand and predict such phenomena with the focus in spatial modelling changing to dynamic simulations of the individual and collective behaviour of individual decision-making at such scales. In this Chapter, we develop ideas about how such phenomena can be modelled showing first how randomness and geometry are all important to local movement and how ordered spatial structures emerge from such actions. We focus on developing these ideas for pedestrians showing how random walks constrained by geometry but aided by what agents can see, determine how individuals respond to locational patterns. We illustrate these ideas with three types of example: first for local scale street scenes where congestion and flocking is all important, second for coarser scale shopping centres such as malls where economic preference interferes much more with local geometry, and finally for semi-organised street festivals where management and control by police and related authorities is integral to the way crowds move

Harmonizing Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation in Transportation and Land-Use Planning in California Cities

Abstract: Recent extreme weather events in California—wildfires, drought, and flooding—make abundantly clear the need to plan effective responses to both the causes and the consequences of climate change. A central challenge for climate planning efforts has been identifying transportation and land-use (TLU) strategies that simultaneously reduce greenhouse gas emissions (“mitigation”) and adapt communities so that they will be less affected by the adverse impacts of climate change (“adaptation”). Sets of policies that collectively address both mitigation and adaptation are known as “integrated actions.” This study explores municipal climate planning in California to determine whether cities incorporate integrated actions into their plans, assess the potential drivers of conflict between mitigation and adaptation in municipal plans, and identify ways the State of California can help cities more effectively incorporate integrated actions. The study methods consisted of a detailed analysis of climate planning documents from 23 California cities with particularly long histories of climate planning, plus interviews with 25 local, regional, and state officials who work on municipal climate planning. The authors found that some cities did adopt packages of integrated actions, and, promisingly, two cities with recently updated climate plans explicitly focused on the need for integrated actions. However, most cities addressed climate mitigation and adaptation in separate efforts, potentially reducing synergies between the two types of action and even creating conflicts. Since the first generation of climate action plans focused primarily on mitigation of greenhouse gases (GHGs), adaptation strategies have not yet been effectively or fully combined into mitigation plans in many cities. Also, a cross-comparison of plan content and interview data suggests that cities often had sets of policies that could potentially create conflicts—mitigation policies that would undermine adaptation capacity, and vice versa. In addition, where a city did adopt integrated actions, these efforts are typically not labeled as such, nor do the policies appear within the same policy document. The study findings suggest promising steps that both municipal and state governments can take to support integrated TLU actions at the local level. For example, cities can proactively link the content in climate mitigation and adaptation plans—a process that will require building the capacity for cross-collaboration between the various departments in charge of developing, implementing, and monitoring climate-related plans. As for the state government, it can provide funding specifically for planning and implementing integrated actions, offer technical support to help municipalities adopt programs and projects that produce integrated mitigation and adaptation benefits, and fund research in the area of integrated actions