LOS CONCEPT FOR CAPACITY ANALYSIS OF PEDESTRIAN FACILITIES

Abstract

Pedestrian is the most efficient and effective mode of transportation for the short trip. People walk for many purposes i.e. work, shopping, recreation etc. Moreover every journey necessarily starts and ends as a walk trip. All trips in urban area, be it by bus, car or train begin and ends as pedestrian movement. In India, the proportion of pedestrian movement is very large. The pedestrians are found as the major component of the total urban traffic accidents. In Bombay city alone 81.9% of the total fatal and 68.9% of injured are pedestrians. Complete segregation from vehicle either through space or interior may solve the problem, Examples in this category are the shopping precincts, pedestrian bridges and subways. For providing the pedestrian facility, it is necessary to analyze the pedestrian flow on sidewalks, zebra crossing, subways and foot over bridges. In the present study, an attempt has been made to find out the capacity of the pedestrian flow on stairways. Pedestrian flow data was collected by video recording technique with one tenth of second accuracy. In the present analysis work ascending and descending pedestrian flow was considered. It has been found- that the exponential model was the best fit model for speed -density relationship for pedestrian flow on -stairways. Capacity of the pedestrian flow for various level of services, and for various widths of stairways was also found and proposed for the implementation.