Smart City Analytics: What German Town Centres Measure with Ariadne

The Challenge

Town centres in Germany are under pressure from online retail, vacant shops, and changing habits. Wirtschaftsförderung and Stadtmarketing teams need to know how many people use each street, what events actually change, and where visitors go next. A manual counting day gives them one day a year.

The Solution: smart city analytics with Ariadne

Ariadne measures pedestrian flows with Hybrid Fusion: signal sensing on lamp posts or behind shop windows covers whole streets and open squares, and Time-of-Flight sensors count defined passages. The data streams carry no identifier: no images, no biometric data, and no MAC address by default. In Ariadne Analytics, towns see:

• Visitors per street, square, and park, every hour
• Flows between streets, as Sankey diagrams and heatmaps
• Event days compared with ordinary days, with a forecast that learns each event's effect
• Weather beside the counts, and benchmarks against other towns
• Monthly PDF reports for the council, and CSV and xlsx exports

Where towns measure with Ariadne

Bielefeld

• About 100 sensors on light masts in the old town and the station quarter since 08/2024, awarded through an EU tender
• More than 11 million visits in the first five months
• Used for event planning, the attractiveness of streets and squares, and traffic planning

Singen

• The pedestrian zone measured since 2023
• About 93,000 visitors on carnival Saturday 2024, with August-Ruf-Straße as a key hotspot

Bremerhaven

• Erlebnis Bremerhaven has measured the pedestrian zone and the Havenwelten waterfront since 09/2025
• More than 40 measuring points with monthly reports, from the shopping streets to the museums on the waterfront

Bad Nauheim

• 28 measuring points in the Kurpark and the shopping streets since summer 2024
• At the April 2025 Art and Garden Market, the busiest park zone reached 1,400 visitors by early afternoon

Traunstein

• Measured since 2022 across the town centre
• 42,682 visitors in the town centre on carnival Saturday 2024
• Event days such as carnival and the Christmas market compared with ordinary days

Waldkirchen (model project, 2023 to 2025)

• About 2.39 million inner-city visits from January 2024 to October 2025
• About 60% of visitors stayed longer than 30 minutes
• A Christmas stand lifted footfall in a side courtyard about sevenfold

Braunschweig

• The Christmas market measured in 2024 and 2025
• About 1.32 million visits in 2025, 5.5% more than the year before, with a peak of about 59,200 on November 29, 2025

Bamberg

• 46 sensors in the town centre for Mitte.Bamberg.2025
• 1,019,399 passers-by in May 2025

Leverkusen

• The Wiesdorf pedestrian zone from 2022 to 2024
• 13,515 visitors on carnival Sunday 2024, against 2,489 on the Sunday a week earlier

Key Takeaways

• Count every hour, not one day a year: continuous counts show what a counting day misses
• Compare events with ordinary days: the same streets and the same measures, year on year
• Keep personal data out from the start: no images, no biometric data, no MAC address by default
• Buy it the way towns buy: Bielefeld awarded its measurement through an EU tender

More on how towns use these numbers: people counting for smart cities.