Plan the city on real footfall, privately
City planners, traffic authorities, BIDs and property owners all need the same thing: trustworthy data on how people move through public space. The catch is privacy. We solved that first.
Whole-city flows, privacy-first, approved by a DPA.
Trusted by
Why public bodies choose Bumbee Labs
-
Privacy-compliant beyond doubt
Anonymous and aggregated by design, built for exactly the privacy constraint public bodies face.
-
Street to wider catchment
Wi-Fi at street level combined with cellular 4G/5G data shows where people come from and go, so you cover key corners and hot spots rather than every metre.
-
An evidence base you can share
Paths, flows, dwell and event impact you can put in front of politicians, the press and the public, and build budgets on.
The job to be done
A city centre competes for visitors with suburbs, malls and e-commerce. Keeping it alive, safe and attractive takes answers: Which areas are busy, when, and why? Where do people come from and where do they go? Did that festival lift the whole centre, or just draw a crowd for the evening? What’s a commercial location really worth, for rents and permits? For a public body there’s a hard constraint on top of every one of them: whatever you measure has to be privacy-compliant beyond doubt. That constraint is the reason this matters here, because it is the only footfall method in Europe approved by a data protection authority, the bar public bodies cannot compromise on.
Measurement runs across streets, squares and districts, street-level Wi-Fi for the centre combined with cellular (4G/5G) data for the wider catchment, and you don’t need to blanket the area to get it. The full metric set and delivery formats are on the data page, and hybrid Wi-Fi + cellular counting covers the method; for the discipline behind event numbers, see measure event impact.
Proof: the City of Västerås
Sweden’s fifth-largest city. For many years the city-centre association, a large membership of merchants and property companies working closely with the municipality, planners, traffic authorities and police, has used Bumbee Labs to keep the centre “alive and attractive”. With access points only where they mattered (the main streets, hot spots and the central station), Västerås has used the data to:
- Tell which events lift the wider centre versus merely draw an evening crowd, day and night.
- Grow the night-time economy and adjust security where young crowds gathered at odd hours, adding benches, comfort features and even skateboarding facilities.
- Discover that the assumed main street wasn’t the busiest, changing window displays, entrances, property values and rent levels across the centre.
- Plan new developments on real movement data for the existing centre.
The result: rising year-on-year visitor numbers and national recognition as a best-managed city centre. Read the City of Västerås case →
Where this fits
The transport hubs and stations that feed your centre are a footfall story of their own (see transport hubs analytics). Public museums and cultural venues share the same public-sector privacy needs (see museums & cultural venues).
We have extensively evaluated Bumbee Labs' solution and the quality insights they produce, in combination with the efficiency of the remote installation process, make this a valuable collaboration. This alliance presents a great opportunity for our distribution ecosystem to provide a variety of service offerings to their customers, opening up new revenue streams.
Frequently asked questions
Is this compliant enough for a public authority to use?
Yes. The method collects no personal data and is anonymous by design, which is why municipalities and other public bodies use it.
Do we have to cover the whole city to get useful data?
No. Covering entry/exit points, key corners and hot spots is usually enough; anonymous aliases stitch the journeys between measured zones together.
Can we tell which events actually benefit the centre?
Yes. You can see whether an event only drew a crowd for the evening or lifted the wider centre, day and night. That is exactly how the City of Västerås uses it.
Compliant where it counts
Validated by academia, partners and customers, so a public body can rely on every number.