Experimental Study on Pedestrian Flow through Wide Bottleneck

A series of well-controlled laboratory experiments with up to 350 test persons were performed to investigate the pedestrian flow through wide bottlenecks. The density and velocity inside the bottleneck do not depend on the bottleneck width, while those in front of the bottleneck change with the width. A linear dependency is found between the flow and bottleneck width (up to 5 m) by comparing our results with the data from literature. However, differences appear only if the data from steady states are used. These differences indicate the effects of other factors like bottleneck length et al. on the flow.