Design Assessment of Lisbon Transfer Stations using Microscopic Pedestrian Simulation

This paper addresses predicting the impact of access gates on pedestrian flow operations in terms of levels-of-service, congestion levels, average walking times, delays incurred at the gates, etc. To tackle the problem at hand, pedestrian traffic operations for different station design alternatives are predicted using the microscopic pedestrian flow model NOMAD. This is done for reference situations (validation), as well as for the design alternatives. It turned out that model provided realistic results. Furthermore, the simple design guidelines used to setup the design alternatives provided satisfactory levels-of-service to the transferring pedestrians, and the gates could be installed without compromising passenger safety. Nevertheless, the need to re-route, inefficient gate use and interactions between conflicting pedestrians flows caused small but significant delays to transferring pedestrians, that could not have been predicted without the use of an adequate micro simulation model.