New Signage System for Improving Pedestrian Flow on Single-Exit Metro Stations: Focus on Paris Metro Line 4 Historical Stations
Résumé
For a number of years now, the use of the Metro is steadily augmenting, making it more and more difficult to ensure traffic regularity (due to a variety of technical problems, increases in exiting/boarding time and passenger accidents), which determines a loss in the system"s energy efficiency and the increase of traction current expenses. In disadvantageous conditions, such as those found in historical stations having only one access to each platform (present notably along the north-south line 4, opened roughly a century ago) and where the movements of passengers can be disorderly, it seems possible to ameliorate the quality of spaces and the overall service through well-focused low-impact improvements. In this paper, a new signage system with a view to improving flow management and providing better information to passengers is proposed. We focus on a particular moment of the voyage, namely the platform-train exchange, in the case of stations with one single exit that have, still today, a cul-de-sac at one end. Without neglecting the architectural aspects and comfort of the passengers, the objective of the proposal is controlling the regularity of traffic and optimising the resulting electricity consumption. The effectiveness of the signage system is validated via an in-house developed numerical tool allowing to explore the impact of the signage system on the modalities and times of the train-platform exchange. The analysis and comparison of several variations have upheld the validity of the improvements hypothesis in its entirety.
Origine : Fichiers éditeurs autorisés sur une archive ouverte