The recent disaster at the Duisburg Love Parade is one of the many occurrences where authorities and event planners claim that they could not have foreseen the tragic events. 21 People were crushed to death during a mass panic in an access tunnel, more were injured and the event was called off.
Although I can understand the organization's position from a legal point of view and maybe understand the position where they wouldn't have a clue how to anticipate on such events, what the hell were the event planners thinking? This is not the first or only event that resulted in casualties due to unplanned mass/group behavior and likely not the last one either.
The research for human predictability has already resulted in many groundbreaking insights and mathematical algorithms to enable crows simulators to pretty accurately predict outcome of predefined scenarios. Unfortunately - as usual - such insights are either known to the happy few who are researching these topics or lie dormant in an academic paper.
The occasional team arises to build a software solution for such types of simulations but currently the most known solution would be the traffic simulation. Why? Because it is commercially viable and can be used to market a company's 'green value'. Understanding traffic flows can enable the company to commercialize services that help the drivers to avoid the bottlenecks, causing less queues, pollution,... Basically, it helps the company get better in terms of image and turnover and the driver benefits from it.
How about the pedestrians?
How about the micro-environment of an event, a campus, a city block in development,...?
Wouldn't it be good to provide the designers as much info as possible about how people will likely behave in those environments under normal and less-normal circumstances?
And the BIG question is: who will pay for it? The car drivers pay for the live service on their satellite navigation system because they can actually directly benefit from it themselves. How about the new house owners that bought their home in a new development? How would you rate the value of knowing that your area will be able to handle the mobility stress? How much would you pay to be sure that your kids will be safe on the sidewalk when walking to the shop on a busy day? Will the pedestrian zone be able to handle the amount of pedestrians in all situations?
How about the city planners that are designing a new urban development? How do they decide on pedestrian areas, pavement width, bottlenecks...? Where do they get their data from and how accurate is it still in 2010 as updates of such data will likely involve a cost not directly covered by any commercial benefit resulting from the design itself. After all, when you buy a residence in a new development you assume correctly that the designers have covered all that.
I believe such simulation service should be available to all designers AND the public. Designers will have the obvious benefit of being able to reduce the risk of disaster, insurance claims... and enhance the visitor's experience. The public will be able to check out scenarios for new traffic lights, pedestrian crossings, parking lots, wider curbs, pedestrian zones... and have well prepared proposals for the city planning commission.
Over the next months I will be covering this in my professional blog as I am investigating the possibilities of providing mobility simulation services to the wider audience.
stay tuned :-)
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