A Study of Movement Down Spiral Staircases

Building codes around the world give extensive guidance on how to design straight stairways, and engineering guidelines provide methods to calculate movement speed and population flow in these. Less guidance is provided for spiral stairways. By conducting experiments down spiral stairways, enough data was collected to derive equations for calculating both movement speed and population flow down spiral stairways. The correlation between the calculated values and the measured values produce near identical values with R2-values between 0.78 and 0.85. The equations are deemed suitable to use for design purposes. The equations derived here for spiral stairways give higher values for movement speed and population flow than the corresponding equations for straight stairways. It is therefore suggested that future studies should seek to validate the equations proposed in this report by conducting more experiments to gain more data on the subject