Religion and Ethics Forum

General Category => Science and Technology => Topic started by: Hope on January 18, 2016, 09:24:21 PM

Title: Quickest way to use an escalator
Post by: Hope on January 18, 2016, 09:24:21 PM

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03fv0km

Counter-intuitive?

Title: Re: Quickest way to use an escalator
Post by: Outrider on January 18, 2016, 09:47:41 PM

Not exactly, just looking at it from a different perspective. If you want to get you out quickly, you walk on the escalators.

If you want to get everyone out quickly, you maximise volume on the escalators, and seeing as people walking up them are more spread out, that's less volume.

Crowd-control prediction and traffic-modelling is an amazingly interesting field of research, and many of its findings appear counter-intuitive because we all tend to think that if each individual attempts to maximise their own speed we'll all move faster, which isn't always the case.

O.