Oasys MaMotion & Birmingham New Street Station

Outside of London, Birmingham New Street is the busiest railway station in the UK, with approximately 32 million passengers moving through the station each year - this places a great emphasis on pedestrian and crowd simulation during every phase of the redevelopment.

The station must function as normal during construction work, which will see a total of 36 new escalators and 15 new lifts installed by the time work is completed in 2015.

Armed with the initial model of the building's geometry, it is quick and easy for the team to create and run specific queries for each job. While MassMotion brings industry-standard data on the behaviour of people in crowds, this is overlaid with detailed New Street rail timetable, generating accurate visualisations of what will happen with time, no matter how small or large the construction stage is. Potential bottlenecks, which might have been missed by hand calculations, are revealed and can be resolved by adjusting plans, hoardings and signage accordingly.

Over the 2014 August bank holiday, passengers used the escalators, lifts and stairs at the B' end of the platforms while the new escalator shafts were integrated with the overhead pedestrian dispersal bridge at the A' end of the platforms.

Steve Lewis, Network Rail's Birmingham New Street station manager, said:

MassMotion was really important in planning how we kept the station running smoothly during this complicated piece of work. We needed to make sure that we understood the way passengers were moving around the station so we didn't run into any crowd control issues. The modelling was really detailed so we were confident we could do this work with the minimum of disruption to the travelling public.

The biggest test of the project's pedestrian planning so far has been the successful overnight opening of the Phase 1 West Concourse of new-look Birmingham New Street station, and closure of other sections.

Alan Wilson, lead fire engineer in the Arup team based at New Street throughout the whole project, said: I have no doubt that MassMotion has been instrumental in keeping the construction process flowing. On the Gateway project it has more than proved itself as a tool for managing crowd movements at transport hubs.

LINK:	http://www.oasys-software.com/blog/2014/09/oasys-massmotion-birmingham...
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