Division Method for Waiting Areas on Island Platforms at Metro Stations
Publication: Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 139, Issue 4
Abstract
A metro station island platform in China takes a high density of passenger flow. For security and energy reasons, most metro stations have installed fully enclosed and semienclosed platform screen doors (PSDs), which causes passengers to gather into clusters in front of the screen doors to await the train rather than distributing randomly and evenly on the platform. This paper proposes a new waiting area division method on a metro station island platform, which can obviously improve the evaluation of the level of service at such stations and the accuracy of simulation software. The paper first analyzes the changes in waiting behavior after the installation of PSDs and the regional function transition during the three processes of waiting, alighting and boarding, and dissipation. Then, by means of video identification and field observations during the peak hours (7–9 a.m. and 5–7 p.m.), determines the shape of the waiting area to be a rectangle on the basis of the distribution pattern of passengers on platform. In addition, the paper presents the notion that the size of the waiting area varies with the different volume of waiting passengers and thereby establishes and validates the mathematical models for length and width of the single waiting area, which concludes that the waiting area width model is in the form of a logarithmic function and the length model is in the form of a power function. Finally, it shows the practicality of the new method in the level of service (LOS) evaluation and simulation accuracy. The result verifies that the new proposed method can truly reflect the feelings of waiting passengers and provide a significant basis for platform operation management. According to comparisons, the traditional method evaluating the whole platform LOS is overly optimistic, whereas the proposed method based on a separate waiting area can truly reflect the feelings of waiting passengers. In the simulation software Legion, the precise division of the platform waiting area with installation of PSDs improves the accuracy of the simulation results.
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Acknowledgments
The research has been funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 50808141). The authors wish to thank Shanghai Shentong Metro Group Co., Ltd., for providing the surveillance video data of platforms at the metro stations.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 139 • Issue 4 • April 2013
Pages: 339 - 349
Copyright
© 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Apr 9, 2012
Accepted: Aug 8, 2012
Published online: Aug 22, 2012
Published in print: Apr 1, 2013
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