Accurate pedestrian counts for Dunedin city areas during a major construction project.
Dunedin Case Study
Location: George Street
Countculture Sensors Provide Valuable Insights into Pedestrian Usage During the Ongoing George Street Works
Establish a network of sensors to help determine how much impact there was on visitor numbers during the construction phase.
The volume and quality of data received provides Council with the ability to go much deeper than ever before.
The Dunedin experience with Countculture could become a valuable test case for other councils.
Glen Hazelton, Project Director Central City Plan at Dunedin City Council, engaged Countculture to provide accurate pedestrian counts for selected areas of the city during a major construction project.
The three-year $100m streetscape upgrade involved extensive remediation of three-waters infrastructure, transport, and amenity improvements for George St and surrounding enabling work on parts of Great King, Frederick, St Andrews and Hanover Streets.
Fearing loss of trade due to roadworks and changes to the area, some businesses and landlords had become particularly vocal about their concerns, which prompted Hazelton to establish a network of sensors to help determine how much impact there was on visitor numbers and what the Council needed to do in response.
“We needed some way of accurately measuring pedestrian visitations throughout the day and night, making sure that we're doing that in the same way all of the time, so we establish a comparable set of data,” Hazelton says.
Our AI sensor and software algorithms provide greater accuracy, and enable inexpensive portable installations, over other Neural Network technologies. Video streams from sensors are processed on the edge and deleted, with only object count and journey data sent over the 4G network to the Count Central Cloud Platform.
Access to accurate data which has allowed Council to consider other aspects of pedestrian movements and issues of safety. They know have ability to think about where we put our security patrols while we're doing the construction. And longer term, how do we intervene in those areas to make sure they're safer for people moving around the city at night?
Improved data means Council has been able to work more effectively with local businesses and investors. Businesses considering moving to George Street might approach Council for pedestrian data to help them weigh up the benefits between two tenancies for example. Or a landlord might use the data to help make a business case for a large investment in a redevelopment, these types of enquiries have already started coming through.
Another opportunity arising from the deep, automated data provided by the Countculture platform, is the potential to aggregate data to and from other agencies and sources. Cruise ship arrivals data could be loaded into the system, for example, so spikes in pedestrian data could be more easily understood. And, potential increase in foot traffic and retail trade spend in a particular area could be linked back to those movements.
"What I'm finding is a lot of smaller councils and agencies out there are interested in the data to test theories they have, but can't afford to invest in a system. For example, if we implement this type of layout, what is the likely outcome? Does it justify investment by attracting more people?"
“The more we can see that across multiple other councils, the more we can extrapolate out and say: ‘it's most likely to have this impact”. And I think that’s really important, because it often feels like we've had different councils reinventing the wheel or trying to find data in their place that could actually be just as well provided from elsewhere.
Hazelton is already looking to the future, with new cameras added into areas likely to be upgraded in future, so when the Council does begin those projects, they'll have a great baseline of data.
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