Zach Despart

Free Press Staff Writer

The head of the Church Street Marketplace says tracking cell phones using the department's new Wi-Fi system provides invaluable insight into foot traffic along the pedestrian thoroughfare.

"We want our businesses to use technology to compete... to thrive and to grow," said marketplace Executive Director Ron Redmond. "We feel like we're in a battle, and a very worthy battle, with the suburbs and the Internet."

The marketplace, a city department, last June debuted a free wireless Internet network on Church Street. At a July 6 news conference, Redmond, Mayor Miro Weinberger and others lauded the system as a public service that would make Church Street more attractive to shoppers.

The marketplace also uses the Wi-Fi network to track cell phones within range of the system, even if users do not log in. Nine antennae along the four-block street pick up signals — called media access control (MAC) addresses — from Internet-enabled devices.

Redmond said this allows the marketplace to estimate how many people are on Church Street in a 24-hour period. Over time, Redmond said his staff can use the data to measure daily, monthly and seasonal trends in traffic. Businesses could better anticipate sales and staffing needs, he explained.

Redmond said the marketplace's member businesses, 70 percent of whom are locally owned, don't have the resources to invest in expensive consumer research.

"They don't have a lot of marketing muscle," Redmond said. "They don't have corporate staff."

Privacy advocates worry about bulk data collection from consumers. Allen Gilbert, executive director of the Vermont American Civil Liberties Union, said collecting data from individual devices could lead the marketplace to seek more information from cell phones.

“We all know that being able to get information from cell phones can lead to serious invasions of privacy,” Gilbert said.

But T.J. Phillips of Capes and Powers, a Burlington consulting firm that helped implement the tracking system, explained that the marketplace cannot use MAC addresses to glean personal information, such as a subscriber name or telephone number.

"It has no means with connecting with anything," Phillips said.

Lt. Shawn Burke, who leads the Burlington Police Department’s detectives unit, said police regularly work with the marketplace and downtown businesses to investigate crimes on or near Church Street. He said broad-based surveillance like security cameras help police with crimes such as burglary and retail theft, where the victim and suspect are likely unknown to each other.

Redmond said the marketplace and many businesses are glad to help police with their investigations, but said the collected cell phone data would be useless to detectives.

Redmond said the phone-tracking technology is an improvement upon old methods of calculating foot traffic. For large crowds, Redmond used to call Burlington police for their best guess. He also solicited the help of a mathematics student at the University of Vermont to estimate foot traffic based on the square footage of Church Street and average amount of space a normal person would occupy.

The results were less than scientific, he said.

"It was actually kind of humorous, what we used to do," Redmond said.

Now, the marketplace can estimate crowds with a far higher degree of certainty. The largest measurement to date was 20,000 people, during the Discover Jazz Festival last June. Redmond said First Night on Dec. 31 drew about 14,000 people — a relief to business owners, who fretted a fatal shooting on Church Street four days earlier would scare people away.

Traffic during a non-holiday week is slower. Redmond said January through March in New England are the most challenging months for retailers, but early signs of springs brought crowds to Church Street.

Saturday, March 5, drew about 11,700 people. The following weekdays saw between 4,000 and 6,000 people.

Redmond said the marketplace is working with downtown businesses to make use of other emerging technologies to remain competitive.

"We feel an obligation to try and take care of keeping all these guys here, and getting them information that's going to help them manage their business better," Redmond said.

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Contact Zach Despart at 651-4826 or zdespart@burlingtonfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ZachDespart.