A bottleneck investigation at escalator entry at the Brisbane Central train station

© 2016 ATRF, Commonwealth of Australia. All rights reserved. Escalators are an essential for passenger’s movements through multi-level rail station concourse environments. Despite the access benefits that escalators provide, they can make travel time longer and pose some challenges when bottlenecks appear at entry. Studying the passenger behaviour of bottlenecks at escalator entrances is essential for planning, designing and control of engineering transportation systems. In this paper we investigate passenger route choice behaviour while approaching an escalator-stair infrastructure set at Brisbane Central train station. A model of an escalator entry bottleneck is formulated. The developed model can explain the queuing characteristics of the bottlenecks and can be readily used to predict congested state occurrence at escalator entry bottleneck. Accurate prediction of bottlenecks occurring around escalators and the estimation of escalator capacity are obtained based on real field data collected from Brisbane Central train station. Results have provided significant insights and computational tools for understanding many features of escalator bottlenecks. Remarkably, escalator capacity at bottleneck points affects the duration and severity of the congested period.