Crowd behaviour in Canadian football stadia — Part 1: Data collection

Abstract

Large crowd sizes at stadia events require an in-depth consideration of human behaviour, since the reliability of egress models in design depends on the confidence of the input data. However, there is little contemporary public data surrounding crowd behaviour, and its implementation into pedestrian movement models, particularly focused on Canadian demographics in stadia. A novel data collection (Part 1) and subsequent egress validation modelling of a Canadian stadium were completed to examine the variability of simulations with behavioural inputs (Part 2). The demographic distribution, pedestrian speed, exit and route choice, and areas of congestion were quantified using high resolution cameras. Behaviourally, pedestrians exited the stadium where they entered which created high levels of cross flow. It was observed that contemporary walking speed profiles for stadia will differentiate from classical profiles especially with reflection of demographic distribution by as much as 31%. Individual walking speeds, while highly variable, impacted overall egress time. Crowd density also being a factor that further reduced their speed.