Times Square Alliance Automates Pedestrian Counting with MRI OnLocation
Founded in 1992, the Times Square Alliance is a nonprofit business improvement district (BID) that works to improve and promote Times Square — cultivating the creativity, energy and edge that have made the area an icon of entertainment, culture and urban life for over a century.
Pedestrian counts have always been incredibly important information for the Times Square Alliance, providing essential data for retail brokers, developers, event planners, and transit hubs. The Times Square Alliance decided to transition from its traditional manual footfall counting program to an automated process. They selected MRI Software’s OnLocation to monitor visitor and vehicle traffic on every sidewalk and highway into and out of Times Square.
Monitoring footfall in Times Square
The Times Square Alliance focused its footfall analysis on the area with the most density and sales potential: Times Square between 42nd and 47th street. Working with private building owners, they secured counter locations that mimicked the historical manual count program that ran twice a year.
The Times Square Alliance is now able to:
- Monitor advertising space and sell based on visitor impressions
- Monitor visitor and vehicle activity between 42nd and 47th street
- Provide daily and hourly data on location and retailer attractiveness
- Aid congestion planning, relief and improve public realm design
- Monitor event visitor flow, behavior and improvements
MRI Software counts foot traffic in Times Square from 33 stories high. That’s 7 people per second, 24 hours a day, averaging 206,000,000 counts per year.
With MRI OnLocation cameras, the Times Square Alliance knows how many people came through Times Square every single day and which hours are the most popular. Previously, they were only able to obtain the information twice a year.
We can give you exact traffic information for when you want to do your event, the time of the day, the day of the week, the week of the month, the month of the year, the seasons; and we were never able to do that before.
Ellen Goldstein,
Vice President of policy planning and design, Time Square Alliance.
The foot traffic data has been used to promote sponsorship and advertising opportunities, attract premium retailers and restaurants to Times Square, highlight the locational impact of newsstands on flow, and analyze pedestrian mobility in the right-of-way.
The Times Square Alliance can now predict the best days to schedule events by looking at historical data and monitoring the quantity and density of visitors on any given day, which was not possible without MRI counters.
Using foot traffic analytics data, the Times Square Alliance can tell you the biggest audience you could possibly ever reach in any public space, and can prove it.
Ellen, Vice President of policy planning and design, Time Square Alliance said “We have the best information on how many impressions any one of our signs are receiving, because we have this ongoing information.“