Councilors press staff on how to measure downtown foot traffic; Placer.ai and hardware counters discussed

A councilor asked during the Oct. 7 work session how the city tracks downtown foot traffic and whether the council should consider purchasing hardware to measure pedestrian counts on Main Street and other park streets.

A city staffer said the city currently uses Placer.ai, a cell‑phone‑data service, for broad historical and regional origin data and that the Placer.ai dataset covers year‑over‑year comparisons back to about 2018. “Placer AI is essentially…using cell phone data. You give it a geofence around an area…and then it provides you the interactions,” the staffer said.

Councillors and staff discussed tradeoffs between cell‑phone datasets and physical hardware. Staff noted low‑cost trail and tube counters commonly used by parks departments, laser counters and camera‑based systems that may raise privacy questions. Staff proposed returning with an inventory of equipment the city already owns and a brief demonstration of options and capabilities.

Separately, the council discussed the city’s data strategy and whether third‑party products such as MySidewalk — which staff noted can include datasets like eviction filings — would be useful for planning and for tracking housing affordability indicators. Staff suggested the sheriff’s office could be a data source for eviction service records that could then be mapped into GIS.

Ending: staff said they will follow up with Transportation and Engineering to catalogue existing counting hardware, evaluate low‑cost trail counters and provide a short briefing on capabilities and costs.