Obstacles Near Emergency Exits Speed Evacuation

BuzzSkyline writes "Despite fire codes that require emergency exits be clear of obstacles, some types of obstacles actually speed evacuation. The counterintuitive conclusion resulted from a series of experiments performed at a TV studio in Japan. Researchers from the University of Tokyo asked 50 volunteers to exit the studio through a narrow door. Video tapes of the experiments show that people made it out quickest when a pole was placed about 30 degrees to one side of the exit. The lead researcher believes an obstacle reduces jamming and friction among people in crowds by decreasing conflicts as the crowd presses toward the exit. A paper describing the research is scheduled to appear in the journal Physical Review E in September, but a preprint is available on the Physics Arxiv."

Comments

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the woman on the pole that's causing the premature evacuation

Re:Anonymous Coward

[girlintraining]

It's the woman on the pole that's causing the premature evacuation

Riiiight. Always the woman's fault. You know, there's pills for that little personal problem.

Lofty goals

[xZgf6xHx2uhoAj9D]

Yanagisawa said that the next step is to program models of people intelligent enough to self-organize into a line.

Personally I think it would be most useful to model humans :\

Re:Counterintuitive conclusions

[causality]

It's shocking that anyone in this day and age still finds it surprising when scientific experiments produce counterintuitive results.

Why is it shocking? Is it ... counter-intuitive for you?