Experimental study on walking preference during high-rise stair evacuation under different ground illuminations

Movements on stairs have attracted a lot of researchers to study in order to help evacuate as fast as possible. However, there has been much less awareness for this issue on preference for stairs and human behaviors under different illuminations. Experiments were carried out to study the human movement characteristics and human behavior performance when pedestrians walked down stairs alone. By extracting the positions of pedestrians on cameras, preference and movement characteristics were studied and discussed, and it is found that pedestrians would like to choose inner side stairs rather than outside stairs when stairs were divided into 2 parts. Besides, some conclusions can be drawn when stairs are divided into three components: when entering into sections under conditions of 100% and 12% illumination, both females and males have a preference for middle areas when the width of stairs is about 130 cm, but the preference would change with illumination conditions. Furthermore, when the illumination is 0%, the mean velocity is 0.50 ± 0.14 m/s. In addition, the usability to handrails helps to reduce time taken on interfaces or mid-landings. The results help to better understand movement during stair evacuations and are important for constructing or improving evacuation models.