Experimental study on crowd flow passing through ticket gates in railway stations

Ticket gates in railway stations or stadiums and security gates in office buildings pose difficulties for evacuation in in case of fire. This paper focuses on the characteristics of a crowd passing through the ticket gates of Japanese railway stations. The characteristics of a crowd flow passing through ticket gates were identified, and numerical values were derived to estimate the evacuation time. A total of 48 subjects were asked to pass through a ticket gate with three passages and three different wide passages, where each width was the same as the sum of the three passage widths of the ticket gate. The crowd flow through the ticket gate was simulated with the pedestrian simulation model SimTread. The results of this study elucidated the flow rate through the ticket gates and the numerical values to calculate the time for evacuation planning.