There’s chaos in the corridors at the labs of Michael Schreckenberg and colleagues at the University Duisberg-Essen in Germany. Schreckenberg specialises in the physics of traffic and transport and has been fascinated by a particular question: how much pedestrian traffic can you squeeze into a shopping mall during the peak shopping hours?
This question has been investigated for people walking in one direction but in reality, most public spaces involve people walking in both directions at the same time.
To mimic these conditions , he sent 67 volunteers careering down a corridor at his labs in both directions and measured the flow.
It turns out that regardless of the speed or asymmetries in the flow, the total amount of traffic–the sum of the flow and counterflow–is always higher than in the flow in a single direction.
Schreckenberg says that could be important for designing evacuation procedures in an emergency situation, particularly in confined spaces such as ships and shopping malls.
However, I’d be interested to know the age distribution of Schreckenberg’s volunteers–he says that most of them are in their twenties.
That may make his results applicable in only certain situaitons such as on board naval ships where almost everyone will be young.
But obviously not for shopping malls where one 83-year old with a zimmer frame could wreak havoc.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0609691: Experimental study of pedestrian counterflow in a corridor