Experimental Study of Bidirectional Pedestrian Flow in a Corridor with Certain Height Constraint

Bidirectional flow is believed to be the main cause of trampling disaster in mass gathering events. To control such kind of disasters, deeper insights into the pedestrian movement features could help. However, bidirectional pedestrians flow of stoop walking has barely been studied. Such form of movement can usually be found when firefighters entered the building to rescue the evacuees who escaped from dangerous zone. Therefore, a series of bidirectional flow experiments with a constraint height of 1.4 m were conducted in order to investigate this movement features. The lanes formation, relationship between speed and density, specific flow and density were analyzed. Results indicated that the numbers of lanes gradually increase with the global density increase. In speed-density relation, when the density is less than 0.8 ped/m−2, the free speeds of bidirectional pedestrian flow is larger when compared with unidirectional pedestrian flow. In specific flow and density relationship, the specific flow of unidirectional pedestrian flow is larger than that bidirectional pedestrian flow when the density is more than 0.6 ped/m−2.