  The aging of population is a social phenomenon in the world. In this study,
series of controlled experiments were performed to investigate the movement
characteristics of elderly pedestrians passing through bottlenecks. Similar
self-organized phenomena to that of the young like 'zipper effect' and 'lane
formation' are observed. The highest local density that appears in front of the
exit in the experiment is beyond 4 m-2. The time lapse between two consecutive
pedestrians of the elderly is about 0.2 s longer than that of the young when
the width is 0.5 m and 0.7 m. Besides, the difference decreases with the
increasing exit width. A linear relation between flow and bottleneck width is
obtained, while the flow of elders is lower than that of the young under the
same width of exits. The waiting time of pedestrians can be divided into two
stages when the bottleneck width is narrower than 0.8 m. The findings in this
study will benefit the evacuation guidance as well as the facility design for
elders.
