Exploring Pedestrian Counting Procedures
A Review and Compilation of Existing Procedures, Good Practices, and Recommendations
Source: Federal Highway Administration, Office of Highway Policy Information
Clear and comprehensive information about pedestrian travel patterns is critical to multimodal transportation planning, programming, and management. This report covers existing guidance and best practices to recommend strategies for accurate, timely, and feasible measurement of pedestrian travel. Recommendations include: 1) expand the use of multi-day/multi-week counts to reduce estimation error rates, and rotate counts around the network; 2) validate equipment at installation and regularly thereafter; 3) tailor quality checks appropriate for low volume versus high volume locations; 4) compute bias compensation factors (e.g., occlusion adjustment factors) to account for limitations related to equipment and locations; and 5) conduct both short-duration and continuous counts to fully consider temporal and spatial aspects of pedestrian traffic patterns.
