Crowd circulation and stadium design: low flow rate systems

For the past 30 years, sports stadia design guides have contained generalised optimistic flow rates for the design of crowd evacuation and egress routes. Unfortunately, even though the guides recognise their own limitations and the fact that lower flow rates should be considered in certain situations, human nature, practical needs and a lack of research has lead to widespread use of guidance values that are sometimes inappropriate. It is imperative within risk assessment and circulation design that this phenomenon is better understood in order to limit the potential for underdesign at the risk of unwanted levels of queuing, congestion and potentially unsafe conditions. This is especially important when considering the progressive move from prescriptive guidance to performance based design within the design industry. In recognition of this, the new European Standard for the design of spectator facilities recommends design flow rates significantly lower than those recommended in traditional sports guidance documents. This paper presents a significant contribution to this work by firstly providing supportive evidence for the new European standard values when applied to football and rugby stadia, and secondly stating that the figures within traditional and new guidance should not be generally applied to what amounts to over 15 different stadia types. Case study evidence is provided to show that the new European standard values still remain up to twice those observed in some stadia types. Reasons are given for the occurrence of low-capacity flow rates within these stadia and recommendations are made for future work to ensure that designers are using appropriate design flow rates for each stadium project.