Leaving the London Eye New Years Eve Celebrations area in double-time

Everyone is getting ready for New Years celebrations, I for one go to see the London Eye Fireworks almost every year. However, as the Mayor has decided to charge £10 to see the fireworks and the requirement of buying it in advance has put me off this year. No doubt I will still be watching it, albeit from a distance. However, if you're one of those lucky ones that have managed to purchase a ticket, and are looking forward to the fireworks, trust me, it's quite a view, and if you go in early enough, you'll get a good spot, when I say early, it's about 8pm. Especially the embankment area, it gets cordoned off after that (well, used to until they started charging), so the number of people is just about right.

The atmosphere is great with everyone in a celebratory mood, London turns into this extremely friendly place, where one feels part of this huge family that has come together to celebrate bringing in the New Year. You get to meet all sorts of people from around the World. When the countdown begins, there's a massive display on the Shell Tower block counting down the seconds until Big Ben strikes midnight, the lights around the London Eye start flashing, and off with a bang go the fireworks timed with music blurring through the speakers along the embankment. The pictures show last year's theme.

Sweet Flavoured theme in 2014

London Eye Fireworks 2014

However, once the fireworks and celebrations are over, you need to head back home or to another party, this is when it becomes a little difficult. The crowd, oh my, the crowd, if you've had a good spot on the embankment, it can take an hour or more to get to the exit at Trafalgar Square along Whitehall due to the number of people trying to get to the stations and back to wherever they want to go. The police generally use a pedestrian traffic management system allowing a certain number of people along Whitehall at a time with a number of break spots. There is also a final barrier at the end of WhiteHall into Trafalgar Square, where people can only exit from the middle of the barrier. The typical route one would take through the crowd to exit from a spot on the embankment is shown in the top map illustration. What happens here though is that you want to get out the quickest way possible, and instinct dictates that you take the shortest route through the crowd, which is through the middle of the crowd flow, where everyone is walking through and you follow the person in front, due to the herding effect, as I explained in my previous post. This is shown in the first picture. However, we don't want to use instincts here, we want to use a better approach to getting through and exiting as quickly as possible. How do we do that?

Typical exit route from the embankment

Exit route skirting the crowd flow (map via Open Street Maps)

We go against our instinct of getting through the dense crowd in the quickest possible way, that is, walking through the middle. Now that most people will be walking through the middle, what we want to do is look at the crowd flow, as long as it's a homogeneous flow, the density of the crowd is the greatest at the middle, so we want to avoid that area, and walk in the areas of least density that is moving in the direction of our exit. The area of least density in our case is the edge of the crowd flow, so as long you skirt the edge of the crowd flow, you will get through to the exit in the quickest possible way. It's only a small change from your typical way of walking in a crowd, just stick to it, and don't let your instincts take over, especially at the end point when you see the barriers, walk around it as shown in the figure. From personal experience, I got through the crowd with my friends to the exit in a little less than half an hour last year. Although I'm aware of this solution as part of my research, I still couldn't help my instincts telling me to go through the middle as well, especially when we were so close to the exit barriers, so it's an innate human trait I suppose, but I had to fight it off. There you go, a simple and effective way that not only works on New Years Day, but in other situations of dense crowds flowing in a homogeneous manner.

Now, hope you all have a really great New Year Celebrations, and hope the New Year is filled with joy and happiness.