FOOT traffic through the Nicholas Street Precinct has increased by 30 per cent since the precinct opened in 2020, according to Ipswich City Council.
The Council issued a statement that there were 2.12 million “visitations” to the revitalised precinct in the past 12 months, or almost 6000 a day.
Unlike crowd estimates or visitor numbers, visitations do not refer to the number of people, but the number of foot traffic movements in and out of the precinct.
While the average daily “visitations” quoted by Council is 6000, the crowd drawn to the precinct for the annual NAIDOC Week event was 6500 people.
A Council spokesman said Nicholas Street Precinct visitation numbers were counted by 11 footfall counters located at every access point of the precinct except Cribb and Foote Lane.
The counters are produced by Swiss company Xovis and supplied by Cohera-Tech, one of Australia’s leading suppliers of people counting equipment and analytics, and use advanced sensor-based technology.
The visitation numbers were released as the Nicholas Street Precinct marked the first anniversary of the opening of its Venue building with the precinct’s anchor tenant Hoyts.
The Council said more than 521,000 visitations to the Venue building had been recorded over the past year.
Mayor Teresa Harding heralded the visitation numbers as a “triumph of urban renewal”, “bringing life back to the city centre with a design that can be held up as an exemplar for people-first public spaces”.
Cr Harding said 21 businesses now operated across the Council-owned precinct, creating dozens of jobs and injecting an estimated $1.25 billion into the local economy by 2032.
“It’s a far cry from the old rundown mall that was essentially deserted, abandoned by customers and businesses, receiving as few as 22,000 annual visits,” Cr Harding said.
“Aside from these impressive numbers, industry experts who have bestowed the precinct with multiple accolades have hailed its example of placemaking, where people are prioritised over vehicles and can enjoy the social and health benefits of pedestrianisation.”
