Planning Melbourne: Foot Traffic Heatmap

As a city planner, making good decisions is imperative for making sure that Melbourne remains the worlds most liveable city. For event planners making good decisions is critical for a successful event, and having those cultural events are a core part of why Melbourne is the world's most liveable city. It is always more difficult to make decisions without the proper information, and in some cases without the proper visualisation tools to help you understand the data. This where we step in - to make sure that by combining the right information with the right technology Melbourne can in the future still claim it's beloved title of the worlds most liveable city. 

So how are we helping event & city planners?

By looking at foot traffic data throughout Melbourne we can provide visualisation tools to help city planners and event planners. By seeing how foot traffic changes over the course of a day, a month or a year you can see what impacts the current infrastructure has, combined with event data this can extremely useful in determining  where and when events should be hosted.

 

For example, White Night Melbourne. By looking at the significant foot traffic over that weekend as compared to other White Night weekends an event planner could determine where the most popular attractions should go and where perhaps more niche attractions should go that potentially will draw their targeted audience but won't be appealing to most visitors. This means that events spaces can be more effectively planned. 

 

The datasets from the following providers could enhance the visual experience

- Open Council Data Platform API

- Dataset with city events to infer why people are going to/from locations (We found one that was behind a paywall)

- PTV datasets, to indicate where/when people arrive/leave Melbourne

- BOM datasets to help corroborate foot traffic patterns

- Building usages dataset to help infer why people are in a particular area

Video URL (YouTube/Vimeo)