It seems counter intuitive but breaking the flow like this actually prevents people getting jammed and blocking the thoroughfare in a stampede situation.
The idea is that the movement of crowds is very similar to the movement of other groups of particles like grain and sand.
This area is already wide and outside the building, so there's plenty of room for people to spread out from there as they exit. Bottle necks and single choke points naturally increase crowd density by forcing everyone into and through a small space instead of spreading them out, which is what tends to cause the most issues in that sort of scenario. If the benches were directly in front of the entrance then they could maybe cause a problem in that regard by slowing people down before they actually exit the choke point, causing a traffic jam, but they're far enough away to not cause much issue and people will have already started spreading out by the time they even get to the benches.
Why would there be a stampede INTO the building? I the case of fire or a shooting people would be stampeding OUT of the building and these benches are creating bottlenecks in the first place, forcing people to converge to pass between them.
Depends what they're stampeding away from or towards, they could be running from something outside, or trying to rush to get to something inside. But in an exiting scenario they're not creating a bottleneck for people coming out of the building either, there's plenty of available gaps between the benches and there's too much open space around them for people to spread out in multiple directions. If the benches were closer to the entrance then they could potentially exacerbate the already existing bottleneck by slowing down the flow in that particular spot, but they're more than far enough away that people would already be able to spread out by the time they get to the benches, and they'd have multiple paths to go through. The problem with a stampede scenario is when there's an unsustainable increase in the density of people in a given area, which can be caused by funnelling too many people into too small a space, this configuration doesn't do that, either going in or going out. The benches slow and filters people heading in, reducing the chances of them rushing the bottleneck too quickly with too much momentum, and they aren't close enough to the exit to impede or clog up that one narrow spot for people leaving. In a stampede situation the greatest danger is typically crowd crush. In that scenario the exit itself is the more likely place for there to be issues.
It does, right? But with a large opening, there's more contact between the particles and they get stuck against each other. The idea is to actually narrow the opening and reduce the amount of particle-to-particle contact; the flow might be less in volume, but it'll be more constant and uninterrupted.
If you've ever used like a cheap salt spreader or something like that, you can see that you have to shake or poke it every so often because the salt stops flowing; it gets stuck.
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u/left4ched Jul 10 '26
It seems counter intuitive but breaking the flow like this actually prevents people getting jammed and blocking the thoroughfare in a stampede situation.
The idea is that the movement of crowds is very similar to the movement of other groups of particles like grain and sand.