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Choosing a Store Location? Count the Foot Traffic Before You Sign the Lease
Before signing a retail lease, count the people and cars that actually pass each candidate location, at the hours your customers shop and in the direction that matters (the side of the street your door is on). Count weekdays and weekends separately, compare locations over the same hours, and split pedestrians from vehicles. A camera with a counting tool such as Passerby, a working example on aiwebcenter.com, does this by the quarter hour and exports a spreadsheet, so you compare locations with numbers instead of impressions.
A lease is often the biggest commitment a store makes, and it’s frequently signed on a feeling: this street seems busy. A broker’s numbers help, but they’re often an annual average for the whole street, not your door, at your hours.
The fix is old-fashioned: count. What’s new is that a camera can do the counting for you.
What to count
People and vehicles, separately. A café lives on pedestrians. A drive-through, a tire shop or a car wash lives on cars. A furniture store wants both: people who see the window, and cars that can stop. Count them apart.
Direction. The people walking toward the station at 8 am are in a hurry. The same people walking home at 6 pm might stop. And the cars on the far side of a divided road may never turn in. Counting by direction tells you which flow actually reaches your door.
The hours your customers shop. Lunchtime for a sandwich shop, evenings and weekends for a gym or a restaurant, Saturday afternoon for most retail. A daily total hides the hour that pays your rent.
Families, if they’re your customers. For toy stores, kids’ clothing or family restaurants, the number of adults with children matters more than the total. That needs a camera at street level, close enough to tell them apart.
How to compare two locations fairly
- Same hours, same days. Count both locations over the same windows: a weekday lunchtime, a weekday evening, a Saturday afternoon.
- Same spot relative to the door. Put the counting line across the sidewalk right in front of the entrance, not at the corner.
- Look at quarter hours, not totals. Two streets with the same daily total can peak at completely different times.
- Write down what was different. A street fair, rain, a closed lane. One odd day can swing a count.
Doing it with a camera
I built Passerby, a working example of a footfall and traffic research tool, to show how this works. You can try it right now on live public traffic cameras, or on a video of your own:
- Record a few minutes of the sidewalk outside a candidate location on your phone, held still or propped up.
- Open Passerby, press Try your own video, and pick the clip. It’s counted on your device, never uploaded.
- Draw the counting line across the sidewalk in front of the door with two clicks.
- Read the cards: pedestrians, bicycles, motorcycles and vehicles, each split by direction, with counts per 1, 5 or 15 minutes and a Download CSV button.
Do the same at the second location and compare the spreadsheets.
For a real study, the camera stays in place for days or weeks and the counts are kept by the quarter hour, so you can see the Saturday that matters, not just the ten minutes you happened to film.
What a count won’t tell you
A count measures opportunity, not sales. Plenty of people pass a busy corner without ever looking at a shop window. Use the count to rule locations in or out, and to negotiate: “your listing says this street is busy; here’s what we counted at lunchtime.”
Counts from a camera are estimates, too. Crowds where people overlap, rain, glare and a camera that’s too far away all lower them. Put the camera close, at a height where people don’t hide each other, and treat small differences between locations as a tie.
Try it
Open Passerby and count a live street for a minute, then try a clip of your own.
Looking at locations, or own a property you want to show tenants real numbers for? Tell me what you’d like to count.