A consultant has been taking notes and taking count of foot traffic on the sidewalks of downtown Charleston.
Peter Bruce, a consultant at Pedestrian Studies, was in town over the weekend and into this week studying the number of people walking downtown, where they're coming from and where they appear to be going.
The downtown pedestrian study, solicited by the Charleston Area Alliance, is part of the America's Best Communities grant program. The city was named one of 50 quarter-finalists and received funding to do "a variety of planning studies," said Susie Salisbury, with the Charleston Area Alliance. Other studies planned for downtown include a retail study, an employment study and looking into providing Wi-Fi in the area.
"We're going to be taking pieces of all of this and putting them together as like addendums to our Imagine Charleston Plan, because in the next phase we have to submit our community revitalization plan," Salisbury said.
The city will then put in a request for the semi-final round of the grant program.
Bruce took daily counts on Capitol Street, Brawley Walkway and Hale Street, to name a few.
Cities study pedestrian traffic because they want to attract street-level shops, Bruce said. He helps by documenting how busy it is in front of store spaces.
"Most of my thinking is how to move somebody 300 feet from one end of the block to the middle," Bruce said.
The ways to do this depend on each city, but tend to be simple, such as store signage, sidewalk sandwich boards and public art. While cities can do major streetscape projects, those tend to be costly and can be difficult to fund, he said.
"What I'm here to do is to try to point them to something that can happen in the next six months to year," Bruce said.
Even fixing the broken clock on Capitol Street can make it more attractive to walkers. Those elements can draw someone down a sidewalk, because they give a person a reason to explore, Bruce said.
Bruce estimated as many as 2,000 people walk along Capitol Street each day. What's getting a person there are the destinations, particularly Adelphia and Pies and Pints. He also said Taylor Books appeared to be a major destination for pedestrians.
Hale and Quarrier streets see about half that, Bruce said.
Understanding the number of pedestrians a street attracts can give real estate agents a better idea of what would draw people to a particular building.
"I hope some of the realtors that control the leasing of these spaces will realize there's more retail traffic than they thought," Bruce said.
Many of the buildings downtown have professional offices on the first floor.
"Professional offices aren't bad, but if you're going to try to grow your nucleus of retail, which then makes the whole pie bigger, then you need to start filling those spaces with complementary retail to restaurants to what we have now," Bruce said.
The corner at Lee and Capitol streets sees higher pedestrian volumes than the middle of the block. Corners tend to get about three times the pedestrian traffic that the middle of blocks would. That's valuable information for a business that might want to occupy a vacant space there.
"The only problem is, it's probably got a higher rent. And somebody's trying to figure out if they can make their business go with that rent, and they're just guessing at the traffic now. We should be able to give them real numbers," Bruce said.
Reach Rachel Molenda at rachel.molenda@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-5102 or follow @rachelmolenda on Twitter.