New solutions for pinpointing where people spend the day

Where do people spend most of their daytime hours? It’s a question constantly asked by organisations involved in sales, marketing and similar activities; and historically this has been surprisingly difficult to answer. Yet for organisations such as retailers who are reliant on daytime or passing trade, it is of vital importance.

MapMechanics’ new solution, Daytime Demographics, picks up the lead given by the 2001 Census, which for the first time asked where people worked during the day as well as where they lived. MapMechanics has taken the resultant information and attached it meaningfully to individual sections of streets, offering users a much more precise basis than the Census data alone for making informed decisions on issues such as the retail potential of an area.

“The 2001 Census was a major step forward,” says MapMechanics’ general manager, Theresa Barlow, “but the workplace data was only supplied at ‘output level’, which means it applied to large areas. Users need much more detailed information about daytime populations in order to be confident of investment decisions such as where to position a new retail outlet. So we’ve created a range of street-level demographic counts.”

Daytime Demographics data shows daytime population according to the number of employees present in each section of street (usually any stretch of road between junctions or other “nodes”). As standard, the information is shown on NAVTEQ street-level map data.

This means, for instance, that with suitable GIS software such as GeoConcept, users can apply differential colour coding to sections of streets to show different densities of population in them. Theresa Barlow points out: “This vividly picks out localities that might be completely missed by conventional geodemographics – for instance, where housing is not particularly dense, and where the street grid may be fairly sparse, yet where there is a concentration of modern office or factory developments that employ large numbers of staff.”

By superimposing related data such as information on the user’s existing resources (retail outlets, for instance), or commercially-available data on rivals’ outlets, businesses can immediately spot under- or over-provision of resources, and new opportunities. Appropriate business datasets are also available from MapMechanics.

Since the data operates at street level, it opens exciting new possibilities for processing the information more usefully. For instance, with the enhanced isochrone generator now available with GeoConcept, users could calculate the catchment for a proposed retail development down to a walking time as precise as six minutes. “Working just with postcode sector-level data, users would typically be limited to measuring a journey time of say twenty minutes,” Theresa Barlow points out. “Our system is much more precise.”

Businesses can also take their analysis a stage further, using another product just launched by MapMechanics – its traffic density dataset. This takes input gathered from 50,000 vehicles in regular daily UK service (and created originally to measure road speeds), and uses spatial aggregation techniques to apply a reliable index of typical traffic volumes to each road segment.

“In other words,” says Theresa Barlow, “using this and our Daytime Demographics system in combination, you can measure not only the daytime population on a given set of streets, but also the potential passing trade.”

It was in fact by drawing on its experience with these roads speeds and traffic density datasets that MapMechanics was able to produce its new Daytime Demographics data so effectively. “We have used similar techniques to automate the process of allocating point data to individual road segments,” says Theresa Barlow.