Bidirectional Pedestrian Traffic

Abstract

Animal groups display a variety of remarkable coordinated behaviors. For example, all the members in a school of fish change direction simultaneously without any obvious cue; in the same way, while foraging, birds in a flock alternate feeding and scanning. Self-organized motion in schools of fish or flocks of birds is not specific to animal groups. Pedestrian crowds display self-organized spatiotemporal patterns that are not imposed by any controller: on a crowded sidewalk, pedestrians walking in opposite directions tend to form lanes along which walkers move in the same direction.