ArticleScience advances2017
Foot force models of crowd dynamics on a wobbly bridge.
Article in Science advances, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Unraveling human crowd dynamics through the foot tracking of pedestrians.Science advances · 2025Article
- Modelling physical contacts to evaluate the individual risk in a dense crowd.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Functional control of oscillator networks.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Emergence of the London Millennium Bridge instability without synchronisation.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Spontaneous synchronization of motion in pedestrian crowds of different densities.Nature human behaviour · 2021Article
- Network-induced multistability through lossy coupling and exotic solitary states.Nature communications · 2020Article
- Walking crowds on a shaky surface: stable walkers discover Millennium Bridge oscillations with and without pedestrian synchrony.Biology letters · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Modern pedestrian and suspension bridges are designed using industry standard packages, yet disastrous resonant vibrations are observed, necessitating multimillion dollar repairs. Recent examples include pedestrian-induced vibrations during the opening of the Solférino Bridge in Paris in 1999 and the increased bouncing of the Squibb Park Bridge in Brooklyn in 2014. The most prominent example of an unstable lively bridge is the London Millennium Bridge, which started wobbling as a result of pedestrian-bridge interactions. Pedestrian phase locking due to footstep phase adjustment is suspected to be the main cause of its large lateral vibrations; however, its role in the initiation of wobbling was debated. We develop foot force models of pedestrians' response to bridge motion and detailed, yet analytically tractable, models of crowd phase locking. We use biomechanically inspired models of crowd lateral movement to investigate to what degree pedestrian synchrony must be present for a bridge to wobble significantly and what is a critical crowd size. Our results can be used as a safety guideline for designing pedestrian bridges or limiting the maximum occupancy of an existing bridge. The pedestrian models can be used as "crash test dummies" when numerically probing a specific bridge design. This is particularly important because the U.S. code for designing pedestrian bridges does not contain explicit guidelines that account for the collective pedestrian behavior.
Identifiers
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.