As one of Europe’s largest outdoor music festivals the visitor monitoring needs are diverse and challenging as demonstrated by our last year’s equipment deployment. The festival itself takes place over five days on a temporary greenfield site. Its crowd monitoring systems are carefully designed to provide the licensing authorities with comprehensive data illustrating the achievement of licensing conformity, regulation, and requirements. The system needs to account for over 140,000 first time ticket attendees plus tens of thousands of traders, security staff and performers. The presence, and movement, of all these categories needs to be recorded and the numbers to reflect the movement on and off site at any given time.

The initial problem is to effect the safe, speedy and recorded entrance onto the site through the seven kilometre perimeter. This end is achieved by deploying tripod turnstiles at various locations around the site. This deployment would typically facilitate an initial peak throughput of some 12,000 visitors per hour. Special arrangements need to be, and are, made to facilitate the entrance of wide loads (large tents) and disabled access for instance. These particular lanes will be monitored by electronic handheld counters.

Once inside, the focus of movement shifts from first time entrants to accommodate visitors wishing to exit to car parks and offsite camping areas and then return. Usually this is a significant number as visitors initially tend to enter the site to pitch their tents and then need to return to car parks to bring in their other items. It is important that these hugely significant personnel movements are separately recorded and identified from first time entrants. As people temporarily leave the site our software will automatically adjust the onsite number downwards and then upon their return the number will automatically be adjusted upwards to give an actual onsite number at any given time. These movements would go through our specifically designated exit and return tripod turnstiles which would typically be adjacent to the first-time turnstile entrances. Once again special arrangements will be made for disabled and wide load access.

A third major movement of personnel which needs to be accurately recorded and constantly monitored to maintain the integrity of the onsite number are personnel effecting entrance through the site perimeter onto site. Typically, this significant number would comprise market traders, security staff. performers and other support workers. A particular issue with vehicular access is to maintain as effectively as possible the free movement of vehicles be they coaches, vans, HGV’s or cars. This is an application where the manual electronic handheld counters are invaluable in so far as they enable organisers and security staff to record the number of vehicle occupants entering and leaving the site without any such visitors needing to dismount and by so doing create traffic congestion.

All the above equipment we have deployed is free standing, battery operated and when eventually removed from site leaves no lasting trace.

Whilst all the above equipment is clearly visible and self-evident a major element of our services is provided away from view in our central onsite monitoring station where each individual turnstile and manual electronic handheld counter reports movements instantaneously where the bespoke software reflects all these movements real time and simultaneously records them for eventual post event analysis should they be needed.