An experimental study on the impact of motivation and gender on pedestrian movement characteristics in a bottleneck flow

The influence of different motivations on pedestrian evacuation efficiency, like whether incentivizing faster moving or encouraging polite behaviors is beneficial to evacuation, and the potential existence of gender-based differences, still lacks clear answers. This study aims to narrow this gap by conducting a laboratory bottleneck evacuation experiment to investigate the influence of movement motivation and gender of pedestrians on evacuation efficiency. Our findings reveal that both bottleneck width and pedestrian motivation significantly impact the flow. For men, when the bottleneck width surpasses a threshold, high motivation increases the flow; below this threshold, it reduces the flow. For women, high motivation consistently leads to higher evacuation efficiency than normal motivation regardless of the bottleneck width. The time interval is significantly influenced by the bottleneck width, pedestrians’ gender and their interaction term. Increasing bottleneck width does not always lead to a decrease in density when men are highly motivated; while for women, wider bottlenecks alleviate congestion around the exit.