A scenario-based approach to crowd safety of major events and its interface to public transport

Abstract

In Switzerland, more than five million visitors annually trust in event operators, authorities and public transport operators to keep them safe on their way home from events. Some of these events push the public transport system to or past its limits. The resulting mismatch between demand and capacity can lead to the accumulation of crowds and thus creates a risk for crowd-related accidents. In the case of disturbances of the public transport system, this risk can increase further. In order to reduce the risk of accidents, it is crucial to design and implement crowd-management measures that are suitable for the expected loads. The first part of this work assesses the the responsible actors as well as current practices of event safety planning with a literature review. In the second part the difficulties associated with the determination of the loads occurring during the departure from events in an urban setting are discussed. Moreover, a methodology for the determination of these loads is proposed and applied to a case study of a concert at the Letzigrund Stadium in Zurich. The methodology is based on a macroscopic pedestrian model and an agent-based public transport model incorporating a parameterised assignment. The model is capable of modelling undisturbed public transport conditions as well as contingency scenarios resulting from public transport disturbances. The results show that the system reacts highly sensitive to assumptions about the assignment and suggest that the usage of equilibrium-based assignment methods can lead to dangerously misleading results. The synthesis of the literature review and the simulation results suggests that the risk visitors departing from an event in an urban setting are exposed to can currently not be estimated reliably.