A Study on the Calculation of Platform Sizes of Urban Rail Hub Stations Based on Passenger Behavior Characteristics

The Chinese national rail transit design specification decides the size of urban rail transit platforms in China. This suggested method treats passengers as homogeneous individuals when calculating the walking area within a platform. However, the heterogeneity of passenger behavior in a rail hub station has not been considered. It is not reasonable to see passengers as homogeneous individuals. In this study, by observing passenger behavior characteristics at rail hub platforms, two parameters were obtained, walking speed and luggage size. Passengers were then accordingly put into different groups, and dynamic spatial demands for each passenger group were calculated by parameter fitting functions. Based on the theory of spatiotemporal consumption, the nonlinear constraint model was constructed to determine the space-time consumption of each passenger group, and finally the area demands of different types of passengers were obtained for different time and passenger flows. An application was made to Beikezhan Station on Xi’an Metro line 2. The calculation results show the area demands ranges of four passenger groups with distinct characteristics, and their space-time consumption varied. The study can calculate the space demands for all passenger varieties within a rail hub transit platform and provide suggestions for the determination of the ideal walking area size of rail transit platforms.