Investigation on the impact of walkways slope and pedestrians physical characteristics on pedestrians normal walking and jogging speeds

Pedestrian’s speed is an important parameter for modelling and simulating pedestrians’ crowd movement under normal and emergency conditions. Limited studies have examined the effect of the slope of walkways on pedestrian’s speed. This study investigates the pedestrian’s normal walking and jogging speed on inclined and level walkways. Specifically, it evaluates the impact of various slopes and pedestrian’s physical characteristics (age, gender, body mass index) on pedestrian’s normal and jogging speed. A total of 1615 controlled experiments with 220 participants were conducted on three different slopes in two directions: level (0%), gentle downhill and uphill (±6%), and steep downhill and uphill (±12%) under normal walking and jogging speed conditions. The age, gender, and body mass index (BMI) of the participants were recorded. It was found that contrary to the normal walking speed, the pedestrian’s jogging speed on the steep downhill significantly decreased relative to level terrain. Under the jogging condition, the speed difference among males and females is higher as compared to the speed difference under normal walking. Likewise, the speed difference among elder and young pedestrians under jogging is almost twice the difference in speed under normal walking. The BMI significantly effects walking or jogging speed and the pedestrian’s jogging speed decreases at a faster rate than the pedestrian’s normal walking speed with an increase in BMI. Our findings suggest that due consideration needs to be given to the pedestrians’ physical characteristics, walkways slope, and selection of appropriate speed when simulating the pedestrians' crowd flow under normal and emergency conditions.