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.

Not realistic enough

[VMaN]

I wonder if those volunteers were realistic enough.. They should have set the place on fire to see some face stomping, and in the long run maybe save lots of lives..

People act very irrationally when they are afraid of being burnt alive for some reason.

Counterintuitive conclusions

[Angst Badger]

It's shocking that anyone in this day and age still finds it surprising when scientific experiments produce counterintuitive results. So-called intuition and common sense are usually nothing more than widely held but unquestioned assumptions. That people involved in software as much as Slashdot readers and contributors should be surprised is even more absurd. We ought to know well that intuitive interfaces are really familiar interfaces; the only really intuitive interface, as some wit once remarked, is the nipple.

In any case, knowledge unverified by scientific experimentation is not knowledge at all. If there is anything surprising here, it is that we made it all the way to 2009 before someone thought to conduct experiments on a matter as important to public safety as emergency exits.

Re:Counterintuitive conclusions

[d3ac0n]

Actually though, if you give it a bit of thought, the result is not as counter-intuitive as you might think.

Basically, rather than having a flat wall with an exit that everyone bottlenecks up at, the pole acts as a "funnel wall" forcing people to line up earlier and more quickly. The same principle has been in use for hundreds of years with cattle and sheep. The "cattle gate" as we now call it, acts to slowly funnel stock animals into a single file line where they can be sheared, branded, loaded onto trucks, etc.

It just goes to show you that mammalian group behaviors are more universal than we might like to think.

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?

Re:Counterintuitive conclusions

[Culture20]

the only really intuitive interface, as some wit once remarked, is the nipple.

And yet I've never seen one person try to suckle a laptop pointer-nub.

Re:Counterintuitive conclusions

[Miksa]

I think the bus drivers in local traffic seem to have come up with the same solution. They usually drive a few meters past the bus stop, so most of the people have to walk beside the bus forming a line naturally before stepping in. Always makes you wonder why more people don't stand after the stop at the point where the bus door will be. Guess that's people for you.

Re:Counterintuitive conclusions

[Deadstick]

If there is anything surprising here, it is that we made it all the way to 2009 before someone thought to conduct experiments on a matter as important to public safety as emergency exits.

We made it to 1942 before we even required emergency exits to open outward. Google "Cocoanut Grove Fire".

rj

Re:Counterintuitive conclusions

[girlintraining]

the only really intuitive interface, as some wit once remarked, is the nipple.

And yet I've never seen one person try to suckle a laptop pointer-nub.

They were too busy with the joystick. :P~

Re:Counterintuitive conclusions

[RepelHistory]

In any case, knowledge unverified by scientific experimentation is not knowledge at all.

I'm for science as much as anyone on this site, but don't you think that's a bit of an exaggeration? You can't learn ANYTHING except through the scientific method?

So-called intuition and common sense are usually nothing more than widely held but unquestioned assumptions.

We DID actually evolve intuition for a reason. It's obviously not right all the time, but there's a reason why we're told to "go with our gut." Intuition is the means by which we pick up all those hundreds of subconscious signals that would otherwise slip by. It's kind of important.

Oh and one more thing while I'm on this tangent: the scientific method uses intuition as part of its process. All scientific experimentation begins with a hypothesis, and without intuition, scientists would be totally unable to come up with a hypothesis to test. Try it: using ONLY deduction, try to think of a hypothesis to test for an experiment. Sorry for the off-topic post, I juar felt like this needed addressing.

Re:Counterintuitive conclusions

[Keebler71]

it's not counter-intuitive to anyone who has studied gas dynamics.... they've rediscovered the "nozzle"

Re:Counterintuitive conclusions

[value_added]

So-called intuition and common sense are usually nothing more than widely held but unquestioned assumptions ... We ought to know well that intuitive interfaces are really familiar interfaces; the only really intuitive interface, as some wit once remarked, is the nipple.

I'd suggest that anyone who is a pediatrician or has otherwise observed a new mother trying to teach her baby how to breast feed would classify the "nipple as intuitive interface" line as not only an unquestioned assumption, but also one that's wrong.

Put simply, the nipple, to use your terminology, is a familiar interface. The familiarity happens very early, and there's a wealth of factors that motivate it, but still it's something that's learned.

Re:Counterintuitive conclusions

[Hognoxious]

A set of data transfer wires. They can be parallel or serial.

Re:Old news

[Heed00]

That doesn't make it old news. Can you provide evidence the principle has previously been articulated?

Perhaps next time you could provide some actual examples/citations/references rather than just effectively saying, "I knew that".

I've seen plenty of obstacles in place to route/control footfall traffic, but none that I can think of to speed up egress. You have examples of those?

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 :\

Dividers yes, obstacles no

[Kjella]

The biggest issue with a real emergency situation is panic. People being squished against fences, walls and other obstacles because there's too many people behind squeezing, making it more dangerous and less efficient. Same is really for people being trampled, it's very dangerous and almost impossible to help someone being trampled back on their feet in such a crowd for the risk of not getting up yourself. I'd be very careful placing obstacles which might lead to more well-behaved behavior in scientific tests (left, right, left, right, that's so much better) but would be very danerous in a real panicking crowd.

Already known

[Dachannien]

These guys already figured this out several years ago. (Sorry, I couldn't find a non-subscription link.)

During the pilgrimages to Mecca, one of the things that people are supposed to do is go into a large stadium and cast rocks at three pillars. Zillions of people attend this event, and there have been numerous trampling deaths at the entrance to the stadium. These guys showed that having obstructions near the entrance improves traffic flow, and so they recommended to officials in Mecca to install such obstacles there, resulting in far fewer trampling deaths near the entrance. Other means of traffic calming were used to mitigate deaths elsewhere in the stadium.

It Makes Sense

[StormyMonday]

Think of it as impedance matching.

Re:but small exit ways can lead to death e2 nightc

[shma]

They are not suggesting making the exit smaller, they are suggesting that an obstacle is placed further from the door to reduce the number of paths to the door and keep the number of people trying to push through the exit at any given time to a minimum. See Fig. 18 in the arXiv paper if you want to look at a diagram of this.

Interestingly enough, these results seem to have been known for a while (probably based on anecdotal evidence). I distinctly remember my fluid mechanics teacher telling our class almost exactly the same thing in 2006, explaining that a crowd headed for the exit behaved in similar ways to a fluid trying to pass through a small opening.

Why a Pole?

[consumer_whore]

Would a Russian or Italian be as effective?

Re:Research of evacuation jamming?

[sentientbeing]

I was at this casino minding my own business, and this guy came up to me and said, "You're gonna have to move, you're blocking a fire exit." As though if there was a fire, I wasn't gonna run.

If you're flammible and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.
[Mitch Hedberg]

Re:Research of evacuation jamming?

[CecilPL]

Unless you're a table.