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Passengers per hour per direction

Measure of passenger capacity of a transportation network

Passengers per hour per direction (p/h/d), also known as passengers per hour in peak direction (pphpd) and corridor capacity, is a measure of the route capacity of a rapid transit or public transport system.

01Definition

The corridor capacity in the passenger transport field refers to the maximum number of people which can be safely and comfortably transported per unit of time over a certain way with a defined width. The corridor capacity does not measure the number of vehicles which can be transported over such way, since the nuclear objective of passenger mobility is to transport passengers, not vehicles.

In terms of quantities defined within the International System of Units, the corridor capacity may be measured in units of \mathrm {s} ^{-1}\cdot \mathrm {m} ^{-1}, i.e., the maximum number of passengers per second per meter of the corridor's width. An approximately equivalent concept in physics is volumetric flux.

Comparative passenger capacity per hour of various modes of transport
Comparative passenger capacity per hour of various modes of transport
Corridor capacity in pax/(s·m)
Corridor capacity in pax/(s·m)

02Directional flow

Many public transport systems handle a high directional flow of passengers, often traveling to work in a city in the morning rush hour and away from the said city in the late afternoon. To increase the passenger throughput, many systems can be reconfigured to change the direction of the optimized flow. A common example is a railway or metro station with more than two parallel escalators, where the majority of the escalators can be set to move in one direction. This gives rise to the measure of peak-flow rather than a simple average of half of the total capacity.

Three parallel escalators; the direction of the middle escalator can be changed to double capacity in one direction (↑↑↓ or ↑↓↓).
Three parallel escalators; the direction of the middle escalator can be changed to double capacity in one direction (↑↑↓ or ↑↓↓).
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Sources and credits

This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article Passengers per hour per direction, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

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