Division Method for Waiting Areas on Island Platforms at Metro Stations

Abstract

A metro station island platform in China takes a high density of passenger flow. For security and energy reasons, most metro stations have installed fully enclosed and semienclosed platform screen doors (PSDs), which causes passengers to gather into clusters in front of the screen doors to await the train rather than distributing randomly and evenly on the platform. This paper proposes a new waiting area division method on a metro station island platform, which can obviously improve the evaluation of the level of service at such stations and the accuracy of simulation software. The paper first analyzes the changes in waiting behavior after the installation of PSDs and the regional function transition during the three processes of waiting, alighting and boarding, and dissipation. Then, by means of video identification and field observations during the peak hours (7–9 a.m. and 5–7 p.m.), determines the shape of the waiting area to be a rectangle on the basis of the distribution pattern of passengers on platform. In addition, the paper presents the notion that the size of the waiting area varies with the different volume of waiting passengers and thereby establishes and validates the mathematical models for length and width of the single waiting area, which concludes that the waiting area width model is in the form of a logarithmic function and the length model is in the form of a power function. Finally, it shows the practicality of the new method in the level of service (LOS) evaluation and simulation accuracy. The result verifies that the new proposed method can truly reflect the feelings of waiting passengers and provide a significant basis for platform operation management. According to comparisons, the traditional method evaluating the whole platform LOS is overly optimistic, whereas the proposed method based on a separate waiting area can truly reflect the feelings of waiting passengers. In the simulation software Legion, the precise division of the platform waiting area with installation of PSDs improves the accuracy of the simulation results.