Overcrowded public transport is becoming an increasingly common sight in cities across the world: cities and transport infrastructure in emerging countries are expanding massively and public transport is becoming increasingly attractive as a sustainable alternative to private car usage. This outburst of public transport usage creates significant crowding challenges in stations and vehicles. Safety is of course the most important concern, but crowd behaviours can also have significant impacts on operations, such as irregularities and delays, and affect the whole attractiveness of the public transport system. A decreased comfort level, longer travel time and psychological & emotional distress can also impact wider mobility patterns in cities and shift commuters to less sustainable modes.

On the long term large infrastructural changes can be incorporated to increase the capacity, although this is not always possible. Hence, for the short term more flexible and cheaper crowd management measures must be applied. Effective crowd management is about managing expected and unexpected crowd occurrences. Taken into the context of urban mobility and public transport, the learning objectives of this course are threefold:

• Understanding crowd dynamics in public transport and their measurement
• Getting a deep insight into prevention of crowd management (through planning, risk assessment, communication)
• Learning from theory and best practice on crowd control management

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