Procuring traffic counting: what to require, what to ask
A traffic measurement procurement decides what your municipality will know about its streets for years. These are the requirements that separate a data series you can govern on from a folder of one-week samples.
Traffic data shapes municipal decisions for a decade: signal timing, street redesigns, safety investments, parking policy, climate reporting. Yet the measurement behind it is often procured as an afterthought, a familiar tube count from a familiar supplier, specified by copying the last specification. This guide covers what a modern traffic counting procurement should require, and the questions that separate suppliers on substance.
Series or samples: decide before you specify
The deepest choice in the procurement is temporal. Sampled counts (a tube for two weeks) answer one question once. Continuous measurement answers questions you have not asked yet: what the roadworks did, what the new crossing changed, how the summer differs from the count week. Specify which streets need a continuous series and which can live with samples, and require suppliers to price both honestly. Buying samples when you govern on trends is the most common and most expensive mistake in this procurement category.
Movement classes: streets are not roads
A road carries vehicles; a street carries vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians competing for the same space. If your planning questions concern streets, require measurement that separates movement classes in the same scene, rather than one technology per class with three suppliers and three incompatible reports. Modern sensor measurement, described in our method comparison, delivers vehicles, cycles and pedestrians as distinct series from one installation.
Privacy: require architecture, not assurances
In a public street, the privacy question is not a formality, it decides what your legal team must review and what your citizens will accept. Specify anonymity by design: no imagery retained, no identities captured, no re-identification possible, stated technically rather than contractually. The full reasoning, and what to require in the specification, is covered in GDPR and traffic measurement in public space. Suppliers whose method is image-free by physics will answer this section in one paragraph; treat long answers as information.
Delivery: the data outlives the contract
Require open, documented delivery: an API, agreed exports, aggregation levels defined in the specification, and explicit data ownership after contract end. Dashboards are a convenience; the series is the asset. This mirrors the requirements we recommend for people counting procurement, because the principle is identical: buy the data and the right to keep using it, not a login.
What Bumbee Labs answers
Bumbee Labs delivers traffic counting as measurement-as-a-service: continuous, movement-class-separated series from LiDAR and AI camera installations, delivered through an open API alongside pedestrian and footfall data, from the company behind the only footfall method in Europe approved by a data protection authority. If a specification is being written, talk to us early, we would rather help you require the right things than quote against the wrong ones.
We are excited about the collaboration with Bumbee Labs through our Unicorn Academy program. A fantastic solution that fits in most of our industry segments such as retail, transportation, public sector etc. We are happy to support Bumbee Labs with our expertise and global presence, and we are delighted to add such an innovative solution to our portfolio, to be offered standalone or integrated in our own solutions.
Frequently asked questions
Should we procure a measurement service or buy sensors?
Decide what you want to own. Buying hardware makes you responsible for calibration, maintenance, data processing and replacement; procuring measurement as a service makes the supplier responsible for delivering validated data to an agreed quality. For most municipalities the data is the point, and the service model puts the technical risk where the competence is.
What should the specification require about privacy?
Require anonymity by design, not by promise: the system should be architecturally unable to identify anyone, rather than collecting first and protecting afterwards. Ask suppliers to state exactly what is captured, whether any imagery exists, and on what legal basis. Image-free methods like LiDAR make this section of the assessment short.
How do we compare offers that use different methods?
Specify the questions, not the technology: which streets, which movement classes (vehicles, cyclists, pedestrians), continuous series or sample periods, and how data is delivered and validated. Then let each offer explain how its method meets that. A method-neutral specification protects you from buying whatever the nearest vendor happens to sell.
What about data delivery and ownership?
Require open, documented delivery (API and exports), agreed aggregation levels, and clarity on who owns the data after the contract ends. A measurement series loses most of its value if it is locked in a supplier's portal or ends with the agreement.