On New Years Day 2021, Philip Maber and Mark Record switched on the FoCW people counter for the first time and it has been collecting data (virtually) ever since .
The counter is positioned immediately to the South of the green railway bridge by Bishop Luffa school.
During the year of 2021 a total of 365706 people were counted going past the FoCW counter.
That is an average of 1002 people passing the counter per day over the whole year.
A .csv data table containing daily counts over the whole of 2021 is available here http://centurionway.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/2021DecHourly.csv
The chart shown below shows path usage over the whole of 2021.
December 2021 was a relatively quiet month with only a total of 25993 people counted going past the counter over the whole month. Christmas day was surprisingly quiet with only 337 people going past the counter in total that day. I find this surprising as I always like to take a walk on Centurion Way on Christmas Day to help digest my Christmas Dinner.
The cart below shows path usage over the whole month of Dec 2020.
Raw data recorded by the counter during December is available here http://centurionway.org.uk/CounterData/2022-01-03.MEM
An hour by hour count of traffic on the path during December 2021 is available in CSV format here http://centurionway.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/2021DecHourly.csv
The raw data can be read using the IMMotion software available here https://www.im-motion.com/downloads/
There have been only a couple of minor counting glitches over the whole year.
- Philip Maber and Mark Record only first got the recorder up and running at around mid day on the 1st of Jan 2021 so we missed counting any people on the first morning of the year.
- In early spring we found that in the middle of the day, the bright sun overwhelmed the counter in the middle couple of hours of the day causing the counter to record error messages and loose some counts at those times. We boosted the infrared beam during the Spring and Summer months and this has solved the problem of loosing counts when the sun is too strong.
- Monday morning 24th May 2021, a woven dandelion decoration was found hung over the counter obscuring the infrared light beam. A few people going past the counter that morning will have been missing from the count if they went past before the decoration was removed.
- On the 25th Aug 2021 survey work was undertaken on the path using distinctive paint to mark the paths of cables and pipes running beneath the ground. At the precisely the same time surveyors were marking the path, somebody sprayed identical survey paint through the counters optical windows, rendering the counter inoperable until repairs were carried out on the 27th Aug 2021.
Philip Maber would like to reiterate that the recorded count is only a lower bound to the total number of people using the path. Because it is an infrared beam counter, people going past next to each other are usually only counted as a single person. Particularly in the festive season couples like to walk past arm in arm causing an undercount. It is likely the actual total number of people passing the counter is around 15% higher than the counter has recorded. All traffic recording devices are compromise solutions and the FoCW has had verification checks made showing it performs impresivly.
Happy New Year to everyone using Centurion Way in 2022
Mark Record