Dylan Brogan
If you walk down State Street, the folks who market Madison’s downtown want to know about it.
The city is installing 10 new pedestrian counters down the entire length of State, one block of King Street and at two other main entry points to the Capitol Square (North Hamilton and West Main streets). It’s something the Central Business Improvement District or BID has wanted for years, says executive director Tiffany Kenney. She says the information will help the city and BID plan for such events as the Madison Night Market, which started last year.
“How many people come to our events is a really important number for things like safety, insurance, how many doughnuts you need to make if you are the doughnut-maker,” Kenney says. “We need to know all those numbers.”
The counters are passive infrared cameras that will be installed by the end of March, tested in April and begin collecting data in May. The city is spending $64,000 from a tax incremental financing district downtown to purchase and install the devices.
The city already has four pedestrian counters on the 100 and 200 blocks of State. Kenney says the BID has been using hand counters to track pedestrians on other blocks, but that job is going the way of the milkman. When the new pedestrian counters come online, virtually the entire business district will be covered.
Kenney says that the data might be used to attract new businesses. “A common misconception is that rent is way higher downtown than anywhere else. It’s actually comparable to other shopping districts in the city,” Kenney says. “We think being able to give hard data on pedestrian traffic will be a new sales technique so we can get more and more unique businesses to settle downtown.”
The first two pedestrian counters — purchased from the French company Eco-Counter — were installed on both sides of the 100 block of State Street in May 2015. The cameras do not use images to detect people, which the company says avoids privacy concerns. According to the website where Eco-Counter publicly displays the data, the devices have counted more than 10 million pedestrians on the block since the counters were first installed.
In February 2017, two “urban post” counters were installed on the 200 block of State Street. These are a different style of pedestrian counters that are installed at ground level. David Dryer, the city’s traffic engineer and parking utility manager, says this counter style produces less accurate data than the counters that hang above the sidewalk. The post counters also resemble cigarette disposal silos, which was initially a problem — smokers were sticking butts in the small holes where the counter’s “eye” spots pedestrians, causing them to malfunction.
But Dryer says after signs stating “Not for cigarette disposal!!!” were added, 24/7 data from the counters has been flowing. They tracked 3 million pedestrians in 2017.
“We’ll keep the little post counters on the 200 block [of State Street], but all the new counters will be the overhead style,” Dryer says. “Since we put up signs, people have generally stopped putting cigarette butts in the counters. It renewed my faith in humanity.”