Crowd Dynamics and Control in High-Volume Metro Rail Stations

Overcrowding in mass rapid transit stations is a chronic issue affecting daily commute in Metro Manila, Philippines. As a high-capacity public transportation, the Metro Rail Transit has been operating at a level above its intended capacity of 350,000 passengers daily. Despite numerous efforts in implementing an effective crowd control scheme, it still falls short in containing the formation of crowds and long lines, thus affecting the amount of time before they can proceed to the platforms. A crowd dynamics model of commuters in one of the high-volume terminal stations, the Taft Ave station, was developed to help discover emergent behavior in crowd formation and assess infrastructure preparedness. The agent-based model uses static floor fields derived from the MRT3 live feed, and implements a number of social force models to optimize the path-finding of the commuter agents. Internal face validation, historical validation and parameter variability-sensitivity analysis were employed to validate the crowd dynamics model and assess different operational scenarios. It was determined that during peak hours, when the expected crowd inflow may reach up to 7,500 commuters, at least 11 ticket booths and 6 turnstiles should be open to have low turnaround times of commuters. For non-peak hours, at least 10 ticket booths and 5 turnstiles are needed to handle a crowd inflow reaching up to 5,000 commuters. In the current set-up, the usual number of ticket booths open in the MRT Taft Station is 11, and there are usually 6 turnstiles open. It was observed that as the crowd inside the station increases to 200-250 commuters, there is a significant increase in the increase rate of the turnaround times of the commuters, which signifies the point at which the service provided starts to degrade and when officials should start to intervene.