Councils across the UK are implementing plans and supporting our safe return to high streets, helping to build back better from the pandemic.
Measures need to be put in to effect to create and promote a safe environment for local trade and tourism particularly in high streets as their economies open and people return.
Quality pedestrian footfall data is required to assess these measures, plan for improvements, and communicate effectively to its citizens their role in ensuring the local economy can reopen safely.
Capturing short-term High-Street footfall data
Historically, manual count surveys have been used to provide temporary pedestrian traffic data either through post-processed, manual enumeration of video recordings or local enumerators counting pedestrians. These methods provide a cost-effective survey covering several hours; however, they have a number of limitations in providing a more meaningful set of data.
Limitations of temporary manual counts
Length of Survey
By their nature manual surveys are only conducted for a limited number of hours. Cameras used for temporary manual counts have a short battery life and can only operate for the period of the battery.
In addition, camera/vision-based solutions are not practical for night-time monitoring due to requiring external illumination. This further reduces the amount of useable data during the winter months to a just a few hours.
Seasonality
When looking at trends and impacts of the plans being implemented by Authorities data is needed such that it accounts for seasonality, this is particularly important in open High Street locations. Manual counts conducted in small time frames can provide misleading data when bad weather conditions impact the location being monitored.
Automatic Pedestrian Counts – APCs
Temporary automatic traffic counts [ATC’s] for vehicular traffic are an established, accurate and proven method of capturing data for a 7-day period.
Accounting for seasonality and weekend periods our APC surveys can be anything from 1 week to several weeks of deployment, capturing key data from hot spot areas in the high street.
Highly portable and discreet, our field technicians can assist in the locating and planning of your monitoring needs. Deploying a single unit or a network of units to suit the individual high street monitoring requirements enabling a rapid evaluation of a base line of data that can be repeated for benchmarking and evaluation.
To discover more about our APC surveys and what Traffic Technology Ltd can do for you Contact Us