Managing Large Flows in Metro Stations: The New Year Celebration in Copacabana

Around 2 million visitors visit the beach of Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro on New Years Eve every year. More than 100,000 visitors travel by Metro. This creates large pedestrian flows inside the station causing major discomfort due to crowding. With the steady increase of the flows in recent years a crowd management plan has been developed and applied to mitigate crowding problems. The plan identified the station as an open system with a feedback mechanism (crowd-management). The station system itself is connected to other systems such as the station surroundings and the trains. An offline analysis before the event identified the individual capacities of the station components, their dynamic properties, mutual influences and dependency to other systems. As a follow-up of these analyses, six crowd-management measures were. These measures and a new crowd-management plan enforced during the operations improved the safety and comfort of pedestrians during the 2012-2013 event. The bottlenecks were better understood and anticipated by their capacity increased causing significantly less crowding in the station and allowing a rapid action of marshals when an emergency occurred. The improved results obtained using few aspects of systems suggest that a methodology based on system engineering could be developed to plan and assess large crowds events.