Estimating the Flow Capacity of Pedestrian Intersections at Railway Stations: A field study at Utrecht Centraal station

Abstract

Understanding pedestrian traffic is essential to design for safe and reliable pedestrian infrastructures, facilities and operations. For the assessment and design of pedestrian transfer areas at stations capacity standards for uni- and bidirectional flows are applied. It has been observed that, at railway stations, also other configurations of flows occur, such as intersecting flows at different angles (e.g. intersections between transfer areas and stairs/escalators or shops). In contrast to uni- and bidirectional flows, for which many researches have quantitatively studied the pedestrian flow characteristics, only little research has been done to intersecting flows. The purpose of this research is to gain insight into how the flow capacity of a pedestrian intersection at a railway station is influenced by several factors and to explore methods that can estimate the flow capacity of a pedestrian intersection. A theoretical framework has been constructed that shows the hypothesized causal relations between the research topic - intersection flow capacity - and several variables that describe the context of this study. Furthermore, three capacity estimation methods were proposed to estimate the flow capacity of a pedestrian intersection. According to the field study, the second and third method both seem suitable for capacity estimations, even though the intersection flow capacity (according to the traffic flow principles) could not be estimated in this study. Several recommendations have been made for future research, including points of improvement regarding the the studied methods, directions for research focus and the usability of the findings in this study.