View article

We revisit the assumption stating that greater levels of rush in pedestrians’ collective egress through narrow bottlenecks impedes the discharge process and makes it slower, commonly known as the ‘faster-is-slower’ phenomenon. The question is of great practical significance because it ultimately can translate into whether crowds of evacuees should be dissuaded from rushing at bottlenecks in order to minimise their evacuation time. Yet, there is a large mixture of evidence on this phenomenon in the existing literature. Here, we re-examine this assumption based on empirical tests with an aim to identify explanations for these discrepancies. Our experiments were conducted with a crowd of 114 individuals, under varying doorway widths (ranging from 60 cm to 120 cm) and under three different levels of (non-aggressive) rush/competitiveness. Under our most competitive condition, crowd density behind the exit …