Geography as a Clock: Smart Mobility Without a Digital Actuator in Mass-Event Rail Egress

Smart-city mobility control often acts through apps, fares, reservations, or gates. In this work, we examine a mass-event setting in which those instruments cannot control demand: the post-sunset movement of over 300,000 pilgrims from Arafat to Muzdalifah. With each platform serving 6000 passengers every 30 min in a ritually fixed window, the only control is the time each camp reaches the platform. We derive a queueing target of one initial trainload followed by 12,000 passengers/h, then evaluate three spatial-zoning schemes with a coupled release–walk–boarding model: capacity-balanced optimization (A1), distance-based optimization (A2), and deployed contiguous zoning (A3). It is observed that A2 achieves the lowest maximum wait (34–35 min); A3 remains within about four minutes (38–39 min) while enabling block-by-block deployment; and A1 reaches 45–48 min because its first-zone composition ignores distance. Field counts show a 33–35 min scheduled target and execution within about ten minutes at two stations. The study demonstrates a full-scale smart-city loop: GPS traces and station counters sense the crowd, a sub-second analytic model supports decisions, and marshals act on the decision without traveler-side technology. The same loop applies to stadium egress, festival logistics, and special-event metro operation. It is concluded that, where origins are spatially organized and supply is batch-like, geography itself can serve as a low-tech metering device.