The spread of passengers on platforms and dwell times for commuter trains: A case study using automatic passenger count data
Dwell times are considered to be one of the main constraints in terms of rail capacity, and have as much of an impact on capacity as maximum running speeds of trains (Harris, 2005). Several factors which influence dwell times have been identified in the past, such as rolling stock design (Thoreau et al., 2016), friction between boarding and alighting passengers (Seriani et al., 2019), and the volume of passengers (Palmqvist et al., 2020) for example. To add to the understanding of dwell times, the study we present here focuses on the relation between the spread of passengers on a station platform before boarding a train and dwell times. The spread of passengers, also known as concentrated boarding (Oliveira et al., 2019), has been shown to have a large impact on dwell times.Measures to help spread out passengers more evenly between the available doors during the boarding procedure have been suggested in the past, ranging from platform markings signalling that people should spread out across to the platform as mentioned by Oliveira et al. (2019), to providing realtime information on the onboard crowding levels (Zhang et al., 2017). When implementing such measures it is not only important to understand the effectiveness of the measures itself but it is also important to understand the context in which these measures can have a beneficial effect on dwell times. The study we present here focuses on the latter and aims to study the relation between the spread of passengers between the available doors and dwell times on a network-wide level to help understand where it is relevant for interventions to be made.