The development and expansion of underground (subway) stations, often located deep underground, has been possible with the introduction of escalators capable of efficiently transporting large volumes of people [1]. As a result,... more
The development and expansion of underground (subway) stations, often located deep underground, has been possible with the introduction of escalators capable of efficiently transporting large volumes of people [1]. As a result, underground stations are reliant upon escalators for circulation and in many cases emergency evacuation. Despite this, few studies have attempted to quantify human factors associated with escalator usage (microscopic analysis), the majority of past studies focusing on establishing capacity (macroscopic analysis) rather than usage behaviours [2-4]. As such, it is uncertain how human factors associated with escalator usage impact escalator performance in both circulation and evacuation situations. It is also uncertain whether human factors associated with escalator usage has a cultural component. To address these issues, escalator human factors data within three underground stations in Spain (Barcelona) [5], China (Shanghai) [6] and England (London) have been collected. In each location the same methodology for data collection and analysis was used. This paper presents an overview of the analysis for the English dataset. Furthermore, using the data collected along with the newly developed escalator model available within the buildingEXODUS evacuation software [6, 7], a series of evacuation scenarios of a hypothetical underground station are presented. The evacuation analysis is intended to explore the impact of using escalators with a variety of realistic human factors.
