Nautilus published an article last year germane to this subject titled 'Want to Get Out Alive? Follow the Ants'

URL: http://nautil.us/issue/23/dominoes/want-to-get-out-alive-fol...

which suggested inside positioning of large solid round pillars at corner exits engineered to receive the funneled crowd-mass pressure and channel it around to the limited capacity exits.

Got a link to any cost-benefit calculations? Every new restriction made nationwide to the building code undoubtably costs society many millions or even billions of dollars. (Something like a trillion dollars of housing is built in the US each year.) I couldn't even find any news stories about people getting killed by being crushed by crowds in buildings in the US in the past couple years.

My suspicion is that building codes should be relaxed rather than tightened.

I don't think that the necessary changes apply to very many facilities at all. Maybe a few thousand buildings countrywide need to worry about crowd crushes. These sorts of crushes happen in predictable circumstances involving hundreds of people; and there are not that many concert amphitheaters. Or consider the Jamaraat Bridge - how many crushes is it, by itself, up to now?

Agree with the general line of reasoning, but I'd guess more people are crushed by small crowds in the US than large ones, exactly because the low-hanging large-crowd fruit has been picked. Would need to see some numbers. It's easy to imagine that changing a concert amphitheaters costs of order a million dollars, so you're already talking about order billions of dollars nationwide.

To be sure, less developed countries have all sorts of fixes that ought to be made.

On the other hand, the value of a life is $10-20m these days and a crush or fire can kill hundreds at a stroke, even in a small venue like the infamous Station fire. So a single incident could easily go into the billions.

I would say this issue could be resolved the same way maximum occupancy limits are established. Require buildings to establish maximum egress numbers (i.e. how big a crowd can be before a building is not allowed to open at all until the crowd is partitioned down into groups that are below the maximum egress number. This would force a pod-like crowd control solution that is observed the the NYC NYE event.

With a solution like this, Walmart would not have allowed a 2000 person line to form. Instead they would have had to partition the line into something like 20 groups of 100 people. Each group would be physically separate from the other with a buffer.

Cost of managing such a crowd grows proportionately to the size of the crowd you attract and costs are only really incurred if a crowd ever forms.

The only added cost is the work necessary for someone to calculate a maximum egress group size per building entrance. That's probably minimal extra work and likely to be proportional to the figures calculated by the fire department for getting people out safely in the event of a fire.

don't know about any calculations like that, people usually steer away to give a value to human life, and it would be very low anyway since, as you noted, there are few such incidents happening nowadays.

this is something that would only apply on the biggest buildings anyway, also, since crowd of such kind usually form at predictable times/places, it might be possible to make-do with temporary solutions, at least on entryways, if the outdoor space in front of the entry is big enough.

Actually, attaching a value to human life is a key operational feature of several federal agencies. There really isn't much way around it when you have a large enough jurisdiction and a wide enough selection of interventions. The FDA, EPA, and Department of Transportation use ~$9 million.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Life_Value_in_th...

I guess that, given the difficulty we have with modelling pathfinding realistically in general, it's still a hard problem to simulate.