Counting users, especially pedestrians, lets you to understand who uses your network and how they move around. Count data provides a reliable basis for making decisions in both urban and natural environments. Find out more about why counting pedestrians can be beneficial to you.
When you count pedestrians in your city or community, you're tracking very important data. For example, pedestrian flows are vital to the economic development of your commercial areas. When a motorist passes a store, they often don't have enough time to stop, park, and enter. A pedestrian, on the other hand, takes longer to walk by and is more likely to enter the store and purchase. In fact, pedestrianized streets often lead to spikes in revenues for nearby businesses.
Tracking the flow of passers-by also enables you to monitor and validate the actions taken to revitalize or enliven urban centers. This may include events, store openings, pedestrianization, seasonal activities, etc. Counting pedestrians provides an objective view of their success and a blueprint for how to improve in the future.
Another benefit: when you count users on your streets, it's easy to see the success of infrastructure investments. Ensuring the safety of passers-by helps to increase footfall. When infrastructure is improved to provide a clean, safe space, pedestrian traffic tends to increase.
When cities count pedestrians, they also help develop walkability. Walkability improves public health and the quality of life in your city. Though increasing walkability can be a challenging endeavor, pedestrian counts give you a good idea of where improvements are needed most, among other benefits.
Now, how do you count pedestrians in an urban setting?
To monitor pedestrian flows and define your counting plan, put your trust in Eco-Counter experts. With over 25 years of international experience in walking and cycling data, we're the right people to help you achieve your goals. Our experts are available to help you define the network in your area, advise you on the most appropriate technology for your needs, and train you in the use of our Eco-Visio data analysis platform.
Urban parks are a key piece of great cities and communities. These places provide users with an accessible way to relax and enjoy the outdoors in the city. However, because they come in so many sizes and shapes, success can be hard to define. Without a baseline for success, how do you know what you should do to make your park better? This is where counting visitors comes in.
With the help of count data, the identification of visitor profiles is an essential piece of information for improving your park. By identifying the times when the most people visit your green space, you'll be able to adapt your opening hours, as well as your maintenance schedule.
Changing opening times ensures that your park satisfies public demand. Based on the time profile, you'll know whether your green space is a "passing through" area or a place to stop and relax. Then, thanks to visitor counts, you'll be able to define peak times, so you can better plan the intervention of your maintenance and upkeep teams.
Finally, if you set up cultural events within your park, you'll be able to assess the return on investment of these events. When you count users over long periods, you'll see if and how much your events cause visitation spikes. Develop a community spark around your parks to make your area more inviting, exciting, and livable.
Whether you're managing a neighborhood park or a larger green space, collecting user-count data just makes sense.
Natural areas are tourist hotspots. As such, their visitation numbers are often affected by seasonality. But what exactly are the effects? Depending on the activities available in the area, user types and modes might also differ widely. Beyond that, how does weather affect your visitor numbers? Finally, should you create more walking paths in a natural park and how safe are your trails?
A automated trail counter can help with all these questions. These systems count all passers-by, regardless of mode. Once long-term data has been collected, you can determine seasonality with monthly profiles, cross-reference it with the weather, and compare years to identify long-term trends. From there, if volumes are steadily increasing, you can conclude that trail expansion is needed. You can also analyze the mode distribution to see if you need to create a separate bike path, for example. Finally, overcrowding or a high proportion of bikes vs. pedestrians can suggest areas where there might be conflicts of use; meaning safety could be improved.
Depending on the size of the area you wish to evaluate, you can plan a network of several pedestrian counters. Some can be permanent, to give an annual trend, while others can be mobile, to study popular areas that vary by season. For this, the smallest counter in our range, the PYRO Nano, can help.
With the detailed knowledge of hiker and user flows in your natural area, prioritize your investments: make smart decisions about how to improve infrastructures, communicate with the public, set up signage, and more.
In order to gather data and trends that will enable you to understand users and their habits, two sources useful of data exist: field count data and floating count data.
Visitor count data from the field can be collected using spot surveys or by asking someone to count passers-by. The disadvantage of this type of counting is inaccuracy and the absence of data when the person is not present. To remedy this, our automatic counters can count users for you.
An automatic counter has a very low margin of error, and counts in all weathers and at all times. This method has proven its reliability because it reflects the reality on the ground. Counting users is therefore simpler, more realistic, and enables the right decisions to be made.
The other way to get an idea of the volumes of people passing by, or how these volumes are changing, is to use floating data. These count data from mobile operators provide information on traffic flows based on GPS data. However, they depend on each pedestrian owning a smartphone and require geolocation data to be active. If this is not the case, not all passers-by can be counted. On the other hand, it gives an idea of the flows and movements taking place in a defined area, providing more qualitative elements and detailed information.
Counting data provides valuable information. They enable us to understand how infrastructures are used, to see how flows evolve, and eventually help justify investments. Here are just a few examples of the information that can be gleaned from analyzing count data:
By observing volumes hour by hour, it is possible to differentiate between commuter and leisure traffic. Here are some examples:
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As can be seen from the graph on the left, traffic flows are heaviest in the morning and evening. This means that travel is more closely linked to commuter activity. On the right hand graph, user flows increase steadily throughout the morning and remain constant until the evening. We're therefore looking at a leisure profile, where traffic is linked to leisure activity.
Such information is invaluable, as it enables us to understand the behaviors of passers-by, whether they are looking for a path to work or a relaxing stroll.
By tracking long-term trends, you can justify your investments and decisions to your partners and the public. Easily visualize the success of your development decisions on sidewalks, paths, and trails.
Using data, you can also visualize the impact of an event on the number of visitors to a park or geographical area. Counting pedestrians makes perfect sense when it comes to validating the success of an event. With audience measurement, you get objective, transparent indicators of how many people your event attracted.
Counting pedestrians helps us understand how infrastructures are used. However, there can be considerable variations linked to the weather, particularly in a tourist area where favorable weather conditions boost visitor numbers tenfold. With Eco-Counter's traffic measurement solutions, you can cross-reference weather data with user counts and visualize their impact.
Counting pedestrians is essential for understanding the flow of traffic in a given area, contributing to its attractiveness and economic success, and ensuring optimum user safety. Whether your objectives concern an urban or natural environment, our experts are at your disposal to discuss our counting solutions and present our data analysis platform.