Planning Safe Pedestrian Mass Events: Proposing a Framework for Mitigating Risks of Crowd Disasters at Mass Events in the Public Urban Space

Mass events are becoming more popular worldwide, with rising visitor numbers as an effect. The accommodation of larger crowds in the public urban space is not met with the available road capacity. The question is how to maintain crowd safety while continuing to organize massive festivities in the public urban space. Therefore, research has been conducted on providing a framework for mitigating risk of crowd disasters for planning safe mass events in the public urban space. The main aim of the framework is to let crowd management authorities acknowledge crowd disaster development, let them be able to assess risks of crowd disasters at event areas and provide them with advice on effective measures for risk mitigation. The framework (1) combines state-of-the-art crowd management from literature and practice with a newly designed (2) macroscopic flow model in System Dynamics to (3) identify the areas with a higher risk of crowd disasters in order to (4) provide the user with a set of crowd management measures for mitigating crowd disaster risks and (5) show their relative effectiveness on the performance criteria for crowd management to support decision-making. For designing this framework methods have been combined from two science fields: Traffic Flow Theory & System Dynamics. The methodology involves an iterative evaluation of the design of the framework by studying archetypes of mass events. These archetypes have been derived from the nautical mass event SAIL 2015 to be held in the city centre of Amsterdam. The framework concepts are proven by application. To assess risks of crowd disasters, research is conducted on defining risks and crowd disasters in line with Traffic Flow Theory. Phenomena leading towards a crowd disaster could be distinguished together with risk stages for crowd disasters in the fundamental diagram of pedestrian traffic of Weidmann (1993). This analysis is used in the framework to assign state-of-the-art solutions to scenarios of crowd disaster development. These measures are implemented in the newly designed macroscopic flow models derived for both unidirectional and bidirectional flowing or queuing situations. For application of the framework the client can choose between general and specific advice. For general advice the framework is qualitatively applied, for specific advice quantitatively. In the latter application the macroscopic flow models designed for archetypes of mass events should be applied. They can easily be adapted to new event situations. By simulation the measures can be assessed on their effectiveness on travel times, risk development, breakdown occurrence and throughput for a specific case. With this framework the state-of-the-art risk mitigation is made available for a wider public who do not have to be familiar with it. With the framework, improving mobility in the public urban space is made easier and better available for non-engineers because of the simulation environment provided in the quantitative part of the framework. On top of that, in the qualitative part of this framework the mass event organiser can improve its mitigation strategy without data available in a limited amount of time.