Effects of Lighting and Barricades in Crowd Management

A large crowd gathers for various purposes: to celebrate holidays, cheer on their sports teams, or protest against their government. For mass gathering events, law enforcement agencies must prepare pre-, during-, and post-event planning, risk assessment, rapid emergency response, and crowd management strategies. Without adequate preparations, disasters can happen, resulting in injuries and deaths due to crowd surges and/or stampedes. This paper focuses on crowd management strategies, describing the systematic studies of the effects of lighting on a landmark, barricades, and guarding law enforcement officers in crowd management. Based on the Honda Celebration of Light event, realistic crowd simulations were conducted to measure the crowd dispersal rates in various configurations with/without lighting on the landmark, barricades of different sizes, and whether barricades are guarded or unguarded. Experimental results show a faster dispersal rate with porous unguarded barricades and without lights. However, use of the guarded barricades is recommended for safety reasons. This study can be applied to better manage a crowd by setting up proper barricades and controlling lights on landmarks.