14-12 Capacity Analysis of Pedestrian Facilities Involving Individuals with Disabilities

Walking facilities are important infrastructures that must be designed to accommodate the behavior of pedestrians in order to be effective. Heterogeneity in pedestrian composition is one important factor generally overlooked in walking facility design guidelines. Particularly, individuals with disabilities are often ignored due to lack of available data on their pedestrian behaviors. A controlled, large-scaled walking experiment involving individuals with disabilities was conducted at Utah State University to observe individual pedestrian behaviors in various walking facilities; these facilities include passageway and bottleneck formations. The purpose of this report is twofold: (1) to model time headway between different individual types using a mixed distribution model, and (2) to estimate passageway and bottleneck capacities and to identify the impacts of involving individuals with disabilities on capacity estimations. Results showed that the proposed model had good performance for pedestrian time headway modeling. Analysis also revealed that visual impaired individuals and individuals using motorized wheelchairs had the minimum and maximum capacity reduction effect on passageways and bottlenecks. The findings are expected to improve the facility capacity estimations required and to meet a preferred level-of-service for heterogeneous populations