Capacity Analysis of Pedestrian Facilities Involving Individuals with Disabilities
PIs: Keith Christensen and Anthony Chen – Utah State University
Project Period: August 1, 2014 – August 1, 2015 (12months)
The design of pedestrian infrastructure is an important process usually achieved by means of supply/demand analysis. The facility designer projects both the typical and emergency event pedestrian demands and estimates the capacity required to meet a preferred level-of-service. Critical to this process is correctly estimating infrastructure supply levels or capacities. Presently, facility designers use guidelines, found in the Highway Capacity Manual and International Building Code, based on pedestrian flow characteristics obtained through empirical research. However, this research has assumed typical homogenous population characteristics. While individuals with disabilities constitute a significant portion of the population (12% of the U.S.’s working age population), pedestrian facilities do not account for the heterogeneity of the population being limited to facility capacities for homogeneous populations. To begin addressing this limitation, our research group at Utah State University (USU) has performed empirical research to observe the microscopic pedestrian behavior of individuals with disabilities in heterogeneous population contexts. The available microscopic pedestrian data enables the examination of various pedestrian facilities to determine the level-of-service capacities for heterogeneous pedestrian populations. The objective of this research is to (1) develop methods to understand the characteristics for various pedestrian facilities which reflect their capacities to serve individuals with disabilities, and (2) develop fundamental traffic flow models for capacity analyses of various walkway facilities (e.g., level passageway, right angle, oblique angle, bottleneck, and doorway) that consider heterogeneous pedestrian populations. The resulting methods are expected to improve the estimating of facility capacity required to meet a preferred level-of-service for heterogeneous populations. Thereby, incorporating disability concerns in the capacity of pedestrian infrastructure can potentially lead to build environments appropriate to the societal context, efficient, comfortable, and safe. And reactive proportional regulatory practices to mitigate the lack of empirical evidence may be proactively amended to reflect likely conditions, to the benefit of individuals with and without disabilities throughout the U.S. and internationally.
