Researchers in Japan have found that couples are less likely to bump into other people – unless they have children. Find out why.
If you hate being jostled while walking through a crowded space, science suggests you should head to that space with a partner.
According to a study published in the journal Scientific Reports in April, couples are less likely to collide with other people, than other forms of pairs that include friends, family, acquaintances and colleagues. With a caveat: if the couple has a child, their chances of colliding with strangers actually increases.
Japan — which prioritises urban planning and is home to one of the world’s most densely populated cities, Tokyo — uses the study of crowd dynamics to help in the design of public spaces.
The study of crowd dynamics often borrows from principles of particle physics and fluid dynamics. A 2019 study published in the journal Science examined the starting line of the Boston Marathon and found, for instance, that even with a staggered start, the crowd of runners moved like a wave. Similar principles have been found when studying murmurations of starlings and schools of sardines.
But what physics can’t account for is social dynamics between individuals.
To understand how relationships between people can affect how they move in a crowd, scientists from the universities of Okayama, Tokyo and Kyoto, and the International Professional University of Technology in Osaka, studied 800 hours of footage of pedestrians moving through two large public spaces in Osaka, which is Japan’s second-largest city.
One space was a 40-metre corridor at a shopping complex. The other was a set of two large underground pedestrian walkways stretching from a shopping centre to a railway station.
While analysing the footage of the pedestrians, the researchers identified over 800 pairs, including couples, colleagues, family and friends, by observing their interactions over time and assigning a value of intensity (between 0 and 3) to these interactions.
The stronger the bond between two people, they found, the fewer collisions they experienced. Unless there were children in the mix.
Family groups had a higher chance of being “broken up” by couples, essentially because the couple forms a tighter-than-average unit. And children, given their erratic behaviour, make the family group more dynamic and amoebic, as it moves through the crowd.
“By taking into account the social dynamics of the people using a particular space, designers and architects could create environments that are more conducive to safe and efficient movement,” the paper states in conclusion. Until the same developments arrive here, to avoid collisions, plan ahead, and always take a plus-one.
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