Ipswich council awards £50k for town centre footfall project

Ipswich Borough Council has a three-year contract with Visitor Insights Ltd to track the most popular spots in town and how much time visitors are spending in the town centre. 

This is a part of the Digital Town Centre project for Ipswich, which has a total budget of £2.34million.

The council began looking for companies that could create a footfall data platform that provides accurate, real-time statistics on multiple criteria in July. 

The contract is valued at £49,999 across the three years.

The new system would look at where people are going, how long they spend in the town centre and what are the most popular areas.

The council will use AR trails to increase footfall in parts of the town. (Image: Archant) Once the popular areas are known, the council also plan to use the Towns Fund budget to create Augmented Reality (AR) Trails in a bid to get people to spend more time in the less-popular areas. 

The council has already released two AR trails, namely Sammy the Reindeer and Digby and Beattie, and wants to achieve a total of 10 by next summer, using insights from the footfall data. 

The council have a system for this in place already, however, they say that the new system would be able to monitor footfall more precisely. 

Cllr Neil MacDonald is in charge of the Towns Fund budget. (Image: Phil Smart)In a previous council executive meeting, council leader Neil MacDonald said: "New footfall counters will come in as well, and I think that will be good. 

"So we can show how many people are going where, where they stay and where they are not going."

Visitor Insights has been looking at street footfall in towns and neighbourhoods across the country and giving their analysis on pedestrian movement as well. 

They have done so recently in cities like Birmingham, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Bristol.