Microscopic travel-time analysis of bottleneck experiments

This contribution provides a microscopic experimental study of pedestrian motion in front of the bottleneck. The identification of individual pedestrians in variety of experiments enables to explain the high variance of travel time by the heterogeneity of the crowd. Some pedestrians are able to push effectively through the crowd, some get trapped in the crowd for significantly longer time. This ability to push through the crowd is associated with a slope of individual linear model of the dependency of travel time on the number of pedestrians in front of the bottleneck. Further detailed study of the origin of such ability is studied by means of the route choice, i.e. strategy whether to walk around the crowd or to walk directly through it. The study reveals that the ability to push through the crowd is a combination of aggressiveness in conflicts and willingness to overtake the crowd.