Influence of mobile phone usage behavior on pedestrian dynamics: An experimental study on single-file flow

With the increasing prevalence of smartphones, pedestrians looking down at their mobile phones while walking has become increasingly common. This behavior not only affects individuals’ normal walking performance but also interferes with the movement of surrounding pedestrians, increasing the risks of congestion and collisions and posing potential threats to pedestrian traffic safety. Therefore, investigating pedestrian movement characteristics under mobile phone distraction is of significant importance. Under controlled experimental conditions, this study adopts texting as a representative distraction behavior and designs a series of single-file flow experiments with different texting proportions. Head and foot trajectory data are extracted to quantitatively analyze the effects of distraction proportion on pedestrians’ overall walking speed, flow rate, and dynamic characteristics, including step length, step frequency, step duration, and synchronized motion. The results show that as the proportion of texting pedestrians increases, the stop-and-go patterns in the time-space diagrams become more pronounced, with longer pause durations. Meanwhile, pedestrians’ free speed and maximum flow rate consistently decrease, leading to a reduction in overall flow efficiency. Similarly, free step length and free step frequency decrease with higher distraction proportions, whereas free step duration increases, indicating a slower collective walking rhythm. Regarding movement synchronization, texting behavior markedly weakens the emergence of synchronized motion. The results obtained in this study provide experimental data support for the parameterization and validation of pedestrian simulation models incorporating distraction effects.