The effect of the ticket gate layout on mixed-flow movement including luggage-laden pedestrians in metro stations

Luggage-laden pedestrians are a common group at transportation hubs. However, there is a lack of experimental research related to the heterogeneous crowds with luggage through subway exit gates. Therefore, this study focuses on the impacts of ticket gate layout on the movement of heterogeneous pedestrian flow with luggage through a controlled experiment. The variables involved in this study comprise three layout types of ticket gates and mixture ratio of luggage-laden pedestrians. An open-source software (i.e., PeTrack) is adopted for the extraction of pedestrian movement trajectories from recording videos. The macro spatial–temporal movement distribution (i.e., trajectory features, density distribution and movement time) and microscopic movement characteristics (i.e., selection preference and queuing features) of pedestrians are analyzed. The results establish that the orientation of the ticket gates perpendicular to the direction of pedestrian flow is advantageous for safety and efficiency compared to parallel arrangements. Under the perpendicular conditions, the facility can better adapt to an increased mixture ratio of luggage-laden pedestrians, and widened gate corridors on the far left is useful to enhance efficiency. Under the parallel conditions, the mixture ratio of luggage-laden pedestrians markedly affects passing efficiency and safety, and widened gate corridors at the far end is more favourable. Additionally, a special movement pattern was observed during the turning process of multi-column pedestrian queues, i.e., the “skip-level” behavior, leading to the phenomenon of “queue proliferation”. These results aim to adapt pedestrian flow line designs in subway station to new conditions, and enhance pedestrian passage efficiency and safety.