How to Draw a Counting Line for an Accurate Footfall Count

Once you have clean footage, the single decision that shapes your whole certificate is how to draw a counting line. A counting line is the virtual line across the pavement that a pedestrian must cross to be counted; get its placement and direction right and the engine does the rest, but a line in the wrong spot can quietly under- or over-count an entire week of traffic. This guide shows landlords, brokers and property managers exactly where to put the line, how to set direction, and how exclusion zones keep the number honest.

Key takeaways

• The counting line must span the full width of the walkway you want to measure — anything off to the side of it is invisible.
• Draw it roughly parallel to the storefront and perpendicular to the flow, where every passer-by has to cross.
• Use per-direction counting so the certificate shows which way the busy side runs.
• Exclusion zones remove stationary clusters (bus shelters, terraces, queues) that would otherwise distort the count.
• Up to three lines per scene handle corner units and double frontages.

What a counting line is (and what it counts)

The engine tracks each pedestrian as an anonymous silhouette moving through the frame. A counting line is a threshold: the moment a tracked person's path crosses it, that is one count, tagged with the direction of crossing. Nothing that never crosses the line is counted, and the same person crossing back and forth is de-duplicated within a short window so a pacing pedestrian does not inflate the total.

That means the line is not decoration — it defines what "footfall past this unit" means for your certificate. If it does not span the route people actually take, the number is wrong no matter how good the video is.

Where to draw a counting line: span the whole walkway

The most common mistake is a short line that only covers part of the pavement. Pedestrians are not tidy; on a wide footpath they spread from the building line to the kerb, and some will step around a bollard or a café board. Draw the line from one edge of the walkable pavement to the other so there is no gap a person can pass through uncounted.

If the pavement is genuinely enormous — a plaza rather than a footpath — put the line across the section that matters for the unit (the stretch directly outside the frontage) and say so; a certificate is about the traffic that reaches this door, not the whole square.

Rule 2: cross the flow, not the loiterers

Place the line roughly parallel to the storefront and perpendicular to the direction of travel. You want it where moving people cross cleanly, and you want to keep it a little off the glass. Why off the glass? Because the strip immediately in front of a window fills with people who stop to look, and window-shoppers standing still are not the same as through-traffic. Counting them as passers-by would overstate flow; counting their fidgeting as multiple crossings would overstate it further. A line a step or two out from the frontage measures the street, which is what a tenant is trying to price.

Get the framing that makes this possible at capture time — see how to capture footfall footage — because a camera looking straight down the pavement makes a clean perpendicular line impossible.

Rule 3: set direction deliberately

Each line counts crossings per direction. On most high streets the two directions are not equal: morning traffic leans toward the station or the office core, evening traffic leans back, and one side of the street outsells the other. A certificate that reports direction lets a prospective tenant see the true rhythm — "the busy flow is northbound, toward the square, and it peaks at 5–7pm." For a food-and-beverage tenant that is the difference between a good address and a great one, so do not collapse the two directions into a single blended figure when the split tells a story.

Rule 4: exclude what stands still

Real pavements have furniture. A bus shelter collects a standing crowd; a café terrace holds seated customers; a popular doorway grows a queue. Left alone, a cluster of stationary people near your line can be miscounted. The fix is an exclusion zone — you mark that area and the engine ignores tracks while they sit inside it. Mark the shelter, the terrace, the queue, and the through-pavement count stays clean. This is also an honesty tool: excluding a bus-stop huddle stops your certificate from borrowing other infrastructure's crowd and calling it street footfall.

Rule 5: use extra lines only when they earn their place

You can draw up to three lines per scene, but most single units need exactly one good line. Reach for a second or third only when the geometry demands it:

• A corner unit with frontage on two streets — one line per street, so each approach is reported separately.
• A property with a primary and secondary entrance — count each.
• A wide unit where the owner wants to distinguish the near-kerb flow from the shopfront flow.

Extra lines add clarity when the site is genuinely two-sided and add noise when it is not. One honest line beats three overlapping ones.

How the line becomes a number

After you place the line (and any exclusion zones) in the scene editor and confirm the quality check, the engine processes the footage, records every crossing per direction, and then samples that up to a full seven-day certificate with a stated confidence interval. The mechanics of that step are covered in how seven days of sampling becomes a defensible estimate, and the finished output is decoded in how to read a Footfall Certificate.

When your scene is set and you are ready to produce the document, head to the pricing page to run the certificate — or if you are a broker, your first listing is $149.

Frequently asked questions

Where should I place the counting line? Across the full width of the pavement, parallel to the storefront and perpendicular to the flow, a step or two out from the glass so loitering window-shoppers are not counted as through-traffic.

Can I count direction? Yes — every line records crossings per direction, so the certificate shows which way the busy side runs.

What is an exclusion zone? An area the engine ignores — a bus shelter, terrace, or queue — so stationary clusters do not distort the through-pavement count.

How many lines can one certificate have? Up to three per scene. One clean line suits most single units; corner and double-frontage properties use more.