Relationship between safe and comfortable crowd density and congestion situation in Mt. Fuji climbing

Abstract

Mt. Fuji is open to the public only during the summer, and during the two-month period, nearly 300,000 climbers visit. At the time of sunrise, the area around the top of the mountain is extremely crowded with climbers, so that proper administration of the climbers is necessary in order to secure the quality of the climbing and the safety of the climbers. Therefore, in this research, various investigations for clarifying the climbers’ dynamics were carried out for the purpose of accumulating the data for the management of the climbers. First, based on the idea of safe and comfortable crowd density required in urban public space, we set and proposed a standard for safe and comfortable crowd density assumed at climbing. Next, we obtained the GPS data of the climbers of Mt. Fuji, and visualized the time series climbers’ density on the trail using the standard presented. And then, we examined the relationship between the factors of congestion and the number of climbers per day.