The Mathematics of Crowds: How Pedestrians Inadvertently Self-Organize
scitechdaily.com
scitechdaily.com
After short thinking I see these rules (without having read the article carefully):
1. When other people stand in your way, you slow down.
2. When someone in front of you walks in the same direction, you follow them.
3. Driving influences behaviour, for example you tend to go around people at the right side (in UK, Ireland, Australia, NZ, Thailand, Japan and so on: on the left side).
No wonder you get interesting patterns (curved lanes). I wonder whether the direction of the curve is pointing the opposite for left- and right-driving countries. And I also wonder if you mix people from different countries whether the curves disappear.
although this book is old: [1]The Secret Family: 24 Hours Inside the Mysterious World of Our Minds
I had the exact same thought. It's logical. If you're moving across a crowded place and the person(s) in front of you are acting as "ice breakers", you naturally follow them in that direction as it is the easiest choice.
If you're moving on your own (you're the ice breaker), you will tend to avoid other people according to normal "traffic rules", and assuming everybody else also does that you effectively have lines going each direction. Also unsurprisingly, if you ask people to "evade" to the opposite side this messes up the system.
In my kids school there is an open yard, through an open gateway, into another open yard in front of the school
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This used to drive me mad as it was literally a bottleneck and i wondered why people could be so inconsiderate, but I started to observe, and people would meet, greet each other, and then walk together to that point to stop and talk - and everyone would do it, it is like they are drawn to that gateway to talk - and it has baffled me, i really think we are hardwired to do it, despite the impracticality of it for other people - why??
But people do it everywhere. Elevators, stairs, bars. Ants do it for a reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiNEORy0Krc
People do too but if they aren't aware enough to move out of the way, it might tell you what part of the brain those people are operating with.
Full of observations and examples like this from city scale down to room scale.
I wanna know why people will drive around the parking lot hunting for that sweet spot, spending who knows how much time, instead of grabbing the wide open spot a lane over that adds about 4-5 seconds of walking.
I wanna know why at my local supermarket a lot of people try to park as soon as they enter the car pack, in effect blocking the entrance lane while they do so (so that in busy times the queue backs up onto local roads). I.e. the entrance lane itself has parking spaces and is adjacent to the store's pedestrian entrance.
A different local supermarket has an entrance lane that forces you to the far side of the car pack before making spaces available. Overall traffic flow is superior because the people who still want to park near the store entrance aren't blocking incoming traffic while they do so.