Understanding pedestrian dynamics and the interaction of pedestrians with their environment is crucial to the safe and comfortable design of pedestrian facilities. Experiments offer the opportunity to explore the influence of individual factors. In the context of the project CroMa (Crowd Management in transport infrastructures), experiments were conducted with about 1000 participants to test various physical and social psychological hypotheses focusing on people's behaviour at railway stations and crowd management measures. The following experiments were performed: i) Train Platform Experiment, ii) Crowd Management Experiment, iii) Single-File Experiment, iv) Personal Space Experiment, v) Boarding and Alighting Experiment, vi) Bottleneck Experiment and vii) Tiny Box Experiment. This paper describes the basic planning and implementation steps, outlines all experiments with parameters, geometries, applied sensor technologies and pre- and post-processing steps. All data can be found in the pedestrian dynamics data archive.

Individual differences in mobility (e.g., due to wheelchair use) are often ignored in the prediction of crowd movement. Consequently, engineering tools cannot fully describe the impact of vulnerable populations on egress performance. To contribute to closing this gap, we performed laboratory experiments with 25 pedestrians with varying mobility profiles. The control condition comprised only participants without any additional equipment; in the luggage condition and the wheelchair condition, two participants at the center of the group either carried suitcases or used a wheelchair. We found that individuals using wheelchairs and to a lesser degree those carrying luggage needed longer to pass through the bottleneck, which also affected those walking behind them. This led to slower times to fully clear the bottleneck in the wheelchair and luggage condition compared to the control group. The results challenge the status quo in existing approaches to calculating egress performance and other key performance metrics in crowd dynamics.

Understanding pedestrian dynamics at bottlenecks and how pedestrians interact with their environment—particularly how they use and move in the space available to them—is of safety importance, since bottlenecks are a key point for pedestrian flow. We performed a series of experiments in which participants walked through a bottleneck individually for varying combinations of approaching angle, bottleneck width and walking speed, to investigate the dependence of the movement on safety-relevant influencing factors. Trajectories as well as 3D motion data were recorded for every participant. This paper shows that (1) the maximum amplitude of shoulder rotation is mainly determined by the ratio of the bottleneck width to the shoulder width of the participant, while the direction is determined by the starting angle and the foot position; (2) the ‘critical point’ is not invariant to the starting angle and walking speed; (3) differences between the maximum and minimum speed values arise mainly from the distribution of deceleration patterns; and (4) the position of crossing shifts by 1.75 cm/10 cm, increasing the bottleneck width in the direction of origin.

Individual differences in mobility (e.g., due to wheelchair use) during crowd movement are not well understood. Perceived vulnerability of neighbors in a crowd could affect, for example, how much space is given to them by others. To explore how pedestrians perceive people moving in front of them, in particular, how vulnerable they believe them to be, we asked \SI{51}{} participants to complete a Two-Alternatives-Forced Choice task (2AFC) in an internet browser. Participants were shown pairs of images, each showing a person, and then asked to select the person who appeared more vulnerable to them. For example, participants would choose between a male person in a wheelchair and a female person carrying a suitcase. In total 16 different stimuli (male vs female; no item/device, 1 suitcase, 2 suitcases, small backpack, large backpack, stroller, cane, and wheelchair), yielding n(n-1)/2 = 120 potential pairwise comparisons per participant. Results showed that wheelchair users appeared the most vulnerable and persons without any items/devices the least vulnerable. Persons carrying two suitcases were in the middle. These results informed the design of a main behavioral study (not reported here).