An analysis of over 800 hours of footage from busy pedestrian areas in Japan found that pairs of people that share stronger social bonds are less likely to physically bump into other people walking.
Couples are less likely to physically bump into other people when walking in busy public spaces than pairs of acquaintances or work colleagues are. However, adding a child into the mix makes the group more likely to have a collision.
When developing mathematical models for how people move in crowds, researchers often borrow techniques from particle physics. But there is one particularly important way that two people in a crowded corridor can differ from a pair of particles – they can be strangers or lovers.
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| Couples are less likely to physically collide with others than friends are Shutterstock/Shawn.ccf |
To determine how social bonds affect the likelihood of a pair of people colliding with others while walking, Takayuki Kanda at Kyoto University in Japan and his colleagues analysed over 800 hours of video footage of pedestrians moving through two large, shared spaces in Osaka, Japan.
One was a 40-metre-long corridor in a multipurpose centre full of shops and offices, while the other space was an underground pedestrian street that stretches for several kilometres and connects Osaka’s commercial district with one of Japan’s busiest railway stations. For each recording, the researchers identified pairs of pedestrians and rated the strength of social interactions between them on a scale from 0 to 4, with the highest value designating romantic couples, based on repeated viewings of how they interacted with each other.
Comparing hundreds of couples and pairs of colleagues, family members and friends, Kanda and his colleagues determined that stronger social interactions between the pair meant fewer collisions with others. In other words, couples were less likely to get bumped into than pairs of co-workers or casual friends.
The researchers also observed that pairs of people coded as family members were more likely to get broken up by other pedestrians. This may be due to the “erratic behaviour” of children, as Kanda and his colleagues wrote in a 2017 study, or because parents and children are more socially conscious of not colliding with a couple than they are worried about briefly not walking side by side.
Ioannis Karamouzas at Clemson University in South Carolina says there are many factors that determine how people walk through crowded spaces, including the design of the space itself and what their goal in being there is, but the new study highlights that social dynamics also really matter.
“Think for example a couple walking together while holding hands. We hardly ever try to break the group and go through it, but rather elect to go around it. Of course, when we are, say, on Wall Street and perceive a pair of colleagues walking together, we are more willing to get close to them and possibly split the group,” he says.
Adding this information to computer simulations of pedestrians could be useful for designing more walking-friendly spaces in cities in the future, and it could even inform how autonomous robots should navigate crowds, says Karamouzas.
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