Park Counters

As parks become more and more popular and visits to Birmingham’s parks increase, Birmingham’s Parks & Nature Conservation Service is looking to collect data around visitor numbers. With this in mind, Birmingham have contacted Nottingham University via Naturally Birmingham’s Future Parks Accelerator programme to begin a trial of the university’s people/mobile device counters.

These counters are going to be trialled in three parks and will run from mid-March 2021 to mid-June 2021 and the counters will be in place at the locations below throughout the duration of the trial:

  • Kings Heath Park – Rangers office, ground floor, Kings Heath Park House
  • Ward End Park – ground floor, Ward End House
  • Cotteridge Park – ground floor, Friends building.

During the 3 month trial period, Nottingham Uni will make people/mobile device data for the sites listed above available to Birmingham’s Parks Service. The Parks Service will use the data to:

  • show footfall numbers to provide data to potential partners who may want to provide a commercial project in the park
  • provide data of trends to show busiest time of day to help review safety inspection and other GM works programme
  • demonstrate the impact of Covid on increased visitor numbers
  • provide footfall data to enable budget decisions to be made to prioritise busiest parks and help Ranger service design its events programme.
  • help determine if more activities need to be provided on a site with low footfall to encourage use and enable parks to focus on survey work on the site to establish reasons for low usage.

Signs will be placed in the selected parks to inform visitors of the visitor counter trial and how they can opt out. The signs will contain the following text:

We are using Wi-Fi sensors to count the number of park users in this area.

To help us improve services in Ward End Park/Cotteridge Park/Kings Heath Park we need to know how many people are using this area of the park.

The data collected from the sensors is anonymous.  Sensors cannot track movements or access data on phones in any way.

You can opt out by turning off the Wi-Fi service on your device while in the park.

Please contact us for more information: