#1679: SlitStreams

A friend mentioned to me yesterday that the passage of people through the railway station ticket barriers reminded him of Young’s slits experiment.

People do seem to collide a lot on the downstream side of the ticket barriers -even if they don’t actually reinforce or annihilate, the effect is to slow the movement through the gates.

Today’s invention is to extend the barriers into a ray pattern as shown.

This allows people to work out which direction they want to move, post-barrier, and visually select the stream in advance which will lead them there.

This means that to head left on exit, route a would be selected, not route b (which would cause the kinds of collisions which currently occur between people who emerge from the normal adjacent barrier channels, turn towards each other and then collide).