Are pedestrian counts something that city does? And I would guess then make available to businesses...?? How do they do that? Set up a camera and just actually count with some "people identification" software?
Yes, sometimes cities do them but often the city merely assists groups of volunteers to do them. A group like Tulsa's Typros for example. There are organizations that can help your group do them with instruction manuals/videos etc. and there are sample "count sheets" and other materials. It's basically just a group of people going out and doing it, nothing too high tech.
Yes the city would often make them available to businesses in order to help attract retail to an area and they can be used by the city to track trends, help planning and infrastructure projects, etc.
I have thrown the idea out several times and lets just say it was mentioned to me "in the hallways" afterwards, that they don't wan't to do them, well, because the city would look bad and we have a better chance of attracting businesses without them knowing the "truth" of where we are currently.
Frankly I think businesses know where we are they can simply look and see how poor our pedestrian traffic is, its pretty durned obvious lol. But I think there is value in doing the numbers to force the city to look at the reality of it, and take steps to make things better versus burying our heads in the sand, looking the other way and going about business as usual. Plus, if anything we will be able to at least show growth trajectories "We were here a couple years ago, we are here now." and that could be positive.
Sadly, whats likely to happen is that we will get this next wave of development, then in a few years everyone will see that things haven't improved much pedestrian wise and retail will still struggle and THEN there will be enough of an urgency to finally face reality and do something. Basically we could have been doing things 5 years ago that we will instead be starting to do 5 years from now, in a much less flexible and more difficult development situation.