Studying the impact of lighting on the pedestrian route choice using Virtual Reality

Efficient crowd management is essential for optimizing the performance of pedestrian infrastructures, either in terms of crowd flow or pedestrian levels of safety and comfort. This study investigates the impact of one type of crowd management measure, namely lighting, on pedestrian behavior. Using Virtual Reality experiments, the impact of lighting, both the brightness level and the light color, on pedestrian route choice is studied. A virtual maze was designed, featuring 10 T-intersections, where the light conditions are varied at each T-intersection to study its impact on pedestrian route choice. Our study shows that pedestrian route choice is strongly influenced by the light color in a virtual environment. Pedestrians prefer to follow paths with green-colored lights and avoid paths with red-colored lights, irrespective of the light color on the other path. Moreover, pedestrians slightly prefer to use the path with a higher brightness level. Lastly, the results indicate that pedestrians do have a slight right-handed tendency on average, however, this effect cancels out almost completely when other guidance information is present in the scenario. Altogether, the findings suggest that lighting can impact pedestrian route choice behavior.