Pedestrians keep a 75 cm comfort zone to prevent collisions

Pedestrians are constantly avoiding collisions with oncoming people. Meters in advance they unconsciously change their walkway to pass each other. Physicists at Eindhoven University of Technology in collaboration with American and Italian researchers analyzed 5 million pedestrian movements at the Eindhoven train station. They discovered that people want to keep an average distance of at least 75 cm. Professor Federico Toschi and postdoc Alessandro Corbetta publish these results today in the journal Physical Review E.