Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Oxford Circus pedestrian crossing opens

Apologies for the lack of posts in recent weeks but I been busy finishing up my course about Agent-based Modeling of Urban Systems at Department of Computational Social Science at George Mason University, along with writing a few new papers.

One thing I have been meaning to blog about for a while is the opening of the Oxford Circus pedestrian crossing. Actually the crossing opened on the 2 November 2009 but its still worth blogging about. A previous post (click here) shows what the planners had in mind (Click here to read the BBC's coverage of the event).

The two movies below show what the designers had in mind using a pedestrian model created by Atkins Intelligent Space which closely matches how people are actually using the crossing (the second movie) and how at the intersection of the crossing, the density of people restricts movement.

The movie below shows what the designers had in mind:

While the second movie shows what it actually looks like and how people are using it.

More about "Oxford Circus 'X-crossing' opens", posted with vodpod


On a side note there is also a lot of work going on about how placing obstacles near exits to speed up the flow of crowds exiting large events such as rock concerts or football games (click here to read more).

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is a really interesting post. I guess it's clear that the visualization they created before the project was not an agent-based model, and it just used folk wisdom to show what the designer "thought" would happen. This BBC article mentions that the same method was used in Tokyo. I wonder how that worked out.

Navya said...

Quite interesting! beautiful design..
thanks

Anonymous said...

Models like this also help explain why it costs in excess of 5 million pounds to build a roundabout it he UK today.