SERVICES

Pre-sales support, planning, project proposal, costings

Whether your project is for one counter or many, the approach should be the same. Linetop offers free online pre-sales assistance to plan your counters so they match your project objectives.  Much can be accomplished by sharing photos on email and drawing ideas on the images.  We can write a proposal (i.e. an illlustrated methods statement) to set out what is being bought, how and where it is to be installed and by whom, any extras like on-site training for client staff, so as to cost the deliverables exactly.  Time and travel to meet you or colleagues on site to assess your locations first-hand to develop a definitive costed methods statement is a chargeable service. Absent a site recce, we may need several exchanges of photos with clients when the best solution is not immediately obvious. We may also ask clients to measure the dimensions of railings, posts, fencing, select a paint colour, so that custom boxes for outdoors furniture will fit together precisely on the installation date and match their surroundings well.  Try to plan counters for new buildings at their architectural stage, especially any having complex doors. For larger or regional-scale projects, it may be better for us to visit all your sites in turn and meet with the local staff, developing plans face to face, and taking any measurements for ourselves as we go along.

Installation work and client staff training on site

Installing counters is often done by Linetop staff followed by a handover to client staff either at the end of that work or perhaps a month later when a fair amount of new data will be available to assess.  Costs relate to time, travel, and consumables like building materials. If client staff act as ‘helpers’ then they will ‘learn on the job’ from Linetop’s experts and thus be able to install similar counters by themselves in the future, or make any repairs by fitting a spare part, or relocate an existing counter to a new location confidently.  Another delivery approach is for Linetop staff to install a couple of counters at client sites as ‘how-to’ demonstrations, then the client staff with the new knowledge can install the remaining counters by themselves later. Installing vehicle counters on live roads or car parks is a technical job with a signifi- cant Health & Safety profile.  It will reduce our costs if a client staff member would manage the road and any traffic while a Linetop staff member installs equipment. Road cutting for loop sensors is a two-person task.  Health and Safety issues will have been addressed and resolved at the methods statement and costing stage.

Data collections and report writing

The training described above makes client staff self-sufficient to run their counters by themselves - but some projects may need to contract some or all of the aspects of ongoing visitor research to Linetop. For example, in Wales Linetop runs some sizeable long-term footfall projects as a total service which includes the periodic data collection, inspection, maintenance of equipment, new batteries, and writing reports. Another operational model is for the client’s staff to maintain their own counters, by changing the batteries and flash memory periodically, then sending their used flash memory cubes to a colleague at a regional centre who will read them and compile a single report covering a number of geographically-dispersed sites. Alternatively they can post used cubes to Linetop for writing up. This is a good way to work where the client staff are more the ‘outdoors’ type of person rather than the ‘analytical’ kind;  it also suits planning or public inquiry cases where independent reporting is helpful. Linetop can view and comment on data files received from clients via email. Every run of a counter at each site (comprising say a few months of hourly counts) results in a single small data file on the PC. These are packaged into complete site-year blocks by EcoPC which is Linetop’s analytical PC app.  It is simple to share or combine results by sharing these small files to colleagues via email or send them to Linetop for comment if something looks odd that suggests an underlying problem needing further investigation or at least to search for a rational explanation.