Performance of stairs – Fundamental diagram and topographical measurements

•Capacity values presented in handbooks are confirmed by experimental data.•Changes of the slope of a stair only have a minor effect on the fundamental diagram.•Laboratory experiments lead to slightly higher flow values than field studies.

This contribution summarizes information about the fundamental diagram of stairs. First discrepancies of fundamental diagrams of well-known planning handbooks for pedestrian facilities and evacuation routes are discussed. To proof the correspondence to experimental data, published measurements available in literature are collected and compared.In the second part we derive a fundamental diagram for stairs downwards based on precise trajectories. In addition we scrutinize the influence of the slope of stair on the fundamental diagram. To check whether our experiments performed under laboratory conditions are comparable with characteristics of motion of every day situations, we present a comparison with a field study carried out at the same external staircase. Furthermore the contribution shows a method to gain topographical information of density, velocity, and specific flow structures to get a microscopic insight into pedestrian dynamics on stairs. This information could be used to identify effective bottlenecks.