The estimation of pedestrian traffic in urban areas is often performed with computationally intensive microscopic models that usually suffer from scalability issues in large-scale footpath networks. In this study, we present a new macroscopic user equilibrium traffic assignment problem (UE-pTAP) framework for pedestrian networks while taking into account fundamental microscopic properties such as self-organization in bidirectional streams and stochastic walking travel times. We propose four different types of pedestrian volume-delay functions (pVDFs), calibrate them with empirical data, and discuss their implications on the existence and uniqueness of the traffic assignment solution. We demonstrate the applicability of the developed UE-pTAP framework in a small network as well as a large scale network of Sydney footpaths.
@article{arxiv.2012.03389,
title = {Traffic Assignment Problem for Footpath Networks with Bidirectional Links},
author = {Tanapon Lilasathapornkit and David Rey and Wei Liu and Meead Saberi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.03389},
year = {2025}
}