Statistical description of pedestrian loading and vibration response of a footbridge

Modelling of pedestrian traffic on footbridges has advanced rapidly over the last decade. This has led to development of numerous design procedures for vibration serviceability checks, some of which have already been included in new generation of guidelines (such as Setra and Eurocode 1). These positive developments, however, will have only a limited impact on design practice until the design procedures are fully verified against a comprehensive set of experimental data. Currently there is a lack of experimental data in the public domain that could be used for this purpose. This paper aims to contribute to developing a database of such data, and suggests a form in which the data should be presented for their efficient exploitation. This is done on an example of a steel box girder footbridge on which both pedestrian traffic and the corresponding vibration response were monitored. The acquired data are presented in a ready-to-use form which is recommended to be followed for data presentation in future experimental works.