Upstairs walking speed distributions on a long stairway

In this work results from an examination of upstairs walking speeds at the outer stairway of the Dutch pavilion at the Expo 2000 in Hannover are presented. The distribution of horizontal walking speeds exhibits a maximum between 0.4 and 0.5 m/s, depending on the local density. To underline the need to measure walking speeds on long stairways if one wants to predict travelling times on long stairways, these results are compared to a second study of walking speeds on a short stair. The main result of that measurement is, that some people actually accelerate when walking upward a short stairway, while such a phenomenon could neither be observed for downward motion on the short stairway nor for upward motion on the long stairway. The mean upward walking speed on the short stairway was found to be roughly twice as large as the one on the long stairway, which corresponds to the data found in the literature. Both studies were done by digitally filming the walking persons and evaluating the resulting material frame by frame for the walking times. Together the results suggest, that the speed on stairs does not only vary greatly depending on the length of the stairway, but also that there is no common scaling factor for the speed on stairs in dependence of the length of the stairway for the whole population. This has consequences, e.g. for the construction of simulation models. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.