Pedestrian Networking/ flow//
‘Simulation is very helpful but it’s timeconsuming and expensive, and if you put rubbish in, you’ll get rubbish out.’ It also remains as much an art as a science. Models can help – but you have to know how to use them, says Clifford. ‘No model can replace good design or the experience of a trained transport planner or skilled operator. Model users and auditors should always review and agree the assumptions made, which need to be appropriate to the building or transport interchange and derived from observations of existing behaviour.’ Open environments, such as high streets, are far more difficult to model than closed ones, such as stadiums, according to WSP’s Pestell. ‘In a stadium, you know where people are sitting, which entrance they will use, the route they will take through the building and the delays at various points, such as ticket gates or security screening. We can model these areas with a great degree of accuracy and we can compare it with what happens in real life.’With an open environment, it’s a different story. ‘You don’t know where people are coming from or going to, or how long they are going to pause in front of shops. Take London’s South Bank: there are lots of attractions and at any time of day it’s full of people walking and wandering, not necessarily to a particular destination. We have to rely on judgement – a common-sense approach based on our experience of other projects.’ There are many sources of information that can help to build up a picture. Pedestrian surveys can be taken at different points, or surveys of how long people spend at certain attractions. Restaurants can also add an
element of certainty, based on the number of covers and the likely ebb and flow of diners throughout the day, as can the location of transport nodes and passenger numbers. But everyone agrees that the greatest challenge is the lack of available data on how different people behave in different situations. Walking patterns vary with age, gender, nationality, mobility, where you are and where you’re going, who you’re with, whether you’re happy or sad, and so on. The ideal would be to attach a tracker to every resident of a city and follow them as they move around – and that’s pretty close to what is actually possible with GPS-enabled smartphones and Bluetooth devices now in many people’s pockets. >>
This model was created by Movement Strategies to analyse crowd flow around the London 2012 Olympic Stadium
Buro Happold modelled people movement around the base of the Centre Point tower for the redevelopment at St Giles Circus in London
:PEOPLE MOVEMENT
AT THE OLYMPICS People movement consultancy Movement Strategies was involved in developing the masterplan and detailed design for the Olympic Park. This included decisions on where venues would be located, and the relative scale of the permanent and temporary elements, as well as helping to conceive how security, operations and transport would work during the event. When the firm was appointed in 2006, a key challenge was predicting the demand. ‘We were designing six years out, so we knew things were going to change,’ says director Simon Ancliffe. ‘We also knew that the second week, when the stadium would be operating, would be busier than the first, so we had to design the Park so it worked at peak times but didn’t look empty with fewer people.’ The first step was to work out how many people would visit and how long they would stay, so Ancliffe and his team developed scenarios for how people would explore the Park. ‘For example, people going to a morning session would go there first and walk around afterwards, whereas for an evening session they walk around first.’ The next step was to develop comfort standards, such as space per person and the maximum length of queues, and then to test the design against these parameters. The resulting strategy ensured a pleasant, hassle-free experience for visitors to the Games, and also led to significant cost savings through the correct design and sizing of pedestrian walkways and bridges. To explain the importance of people movement analysis, Ancliffe says you need to ask instead why user experience is important to building design: ‘People movement is a critical aspect of use.’
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