Footfall in Singapore

How to find out how many people walk past a shop in Singapore

Count the passers-by yourself: stand outside the unit for at least 4 to 6 hours on a weekday, and again on a weekend day. For the wider area, check LTA DataMall’s monthly tap-in and tap-out counts for the bus stops and MRT station nearest the shop.

Sources checked on 29 September 2026

What does each source count?

Source	What it counts	What it cannot tell you
Your own count	Everyone passing your unit in the hours you count	You will miss a few
LTA DataMall passenger volume	Tap-ins and tap-outs at each bus stop and MRT station, by hour, each month	Passengers at the stop, not people walking past your door
Google Maps Popular times	How busy a place usually is, against its own weekly peak	Not a head count, and shown only with enough visit data
Your landlord	Visitors at their entrances, if they count them	The retail leasing Code does not make them share it

How do I count people walking past a shop?

Stand where you can see the whole shopfront. Count everyone passing on your side, in both directions. Count the far side separately if people cross easily.
Use a hand clicker or tick marks on paper. Keep a separate tally for each direction.
Count for 4 to 6 hours in your trading hours, including the busiest time. That was the minimum for hand counts in the 2013 Traffic Monitoring Guide of the US Federal Highway Administration (FHWA).
Rest or swap with a helper every 2 hours. The 2013 guide says hand counts get less accurate after that.
Count one weekday and one weekend day, at the same hours. The 2013 guide cites advice that a busy spot, over 100 people an hour at midday, usually needs only those two days. Quieter spots need at least one more round, maybe two.
Pick ordinary days. Avoid public holidays and days with a special event nearby. LTA’s own figures group public holidays with weekends. Check MOM’s public holiday list, and MOE’s school calendar so you know if you are counting in the school holidays.
If heavy rain hits your count, count again on another day at the same hours. FHWA’s current guide gives this rule, and says bad weather can have a big effect on how many people walk.
Write it down by time block, with a row for each half hour and a column for each direction.
Expect to miss a few, even with a clicker. In one study cited by FHWA, counts on paper or clickers at road junctions came in 8% to 25% lower than counts made from video.
Also count people walking into the nearest shop like yours. That shows how many passers-by actually go in.

How do I get LTA’s tap counts for bus stops and MRT stations?

LTA publishes Passenger Volume by Bus Stops and Passenger Volume by Train Stations on LTA DataMall every month. In each file, a row is one stop or station in one clock hour, with its tap-ins and tap-outs, on weekdays or on weekends. Weekends include public holidays.

What it cannot tell you. These are passengers tapping in and out at that stop, not people walking past your door. The file has no exit column, so a station figure covers the whole station. Some interchanges share one code: EW14-NS26 is all of Raffles Place.

Getting it. Request an Account Key on DataMall. The form asks for your name, email and phone number, and what you will use the data for. You accept the Singapore Open Data Licence and LTA’s Terms of Service for API and SDK. LTA says access is instant.

The next step needs code or a developer’s tool, and LTA’s API User Guide shows how. Put your key in a header named AccountKey. Send the request to https://datamall2.mytransport.sg/ltaodataservice/PV/Bus for bus stops, or the same address ending in PV/Train for stations. You cannot ask for one stop: the only choice is the month, written like LTA’s example Date=201803. You get a download link that expires after 15 minutes, for a zipped CSV table. Last month’s file is ready by the 10th, and only the last three months can be requested, so save each one. If this is new to you, ask someone who writes code to help.

Finding your stops. Every bus stop has its own five-digit code, shown on the bus stop pole. Walk to the stops nearest the shop and note each code. Train station codes are in the file Train Station Codes and Chinese Names.csv, under Public Transport on the DataMall portal.

Reading a row. LTA’s own example is bus stop 50199, Opp Shaw Plaza, in May 2018. Across all weekdays that month, it had 853 tap-ins and 834 tap-outs between 8pm and 8.59pm. That is a total for the whole month, not one day. To get a daily figure, divide by that month’s weekdays, leaving out public holidays. In a month with 20 such days, 853 would be about 43 tap-ins in that hour each day.

The licence. You may use the data royalty-free, even for business. Anything you publish from it must credit the source and link the licence.

LTA’s average ridership table on data.gov.sg will not help here: it gives one daily average per mode, per year, for all of Singapore.

What can Google Maps tell me?

Popular times on a Google Maps listing shows how busy that place usually is through the day. It is an average over the last few months, shown against the place’s own weekly peak, not a head count. It appears only when Google has enough visit data. The “Busy area” label in Google Maps never shows a total number of people either. Use Popular times on nearby shops to choose your counting hours.

Can the landlord tell me?

The Code of Conduct for Leasing of Retail Premises has no rule on sharing footfall, so ask. For a unit or kiosk in a mall, ask whether they count visitors at the entrance nearest your spot. Ask for counts by day and by hour for recent months, and which entrances they cover.

The Code covers leases and licences of retail premises for a year or more, signed from 1 February 2024. Its rule on sales data applies when part of your rent is a share of your sales (GTO rent). The landlord must then share total monthly sales and floor area for your trade category before you sign. That is sales, not footfall, and it does not apply where fewer than 3 tenants share the category.

Does footfall matter when choosing a shop?

In 2020, the Competition and Consumer Commission of Singapore (CCCS) surveyed tenants of private retail spaces. When choosing a mall, they named footfall almost as often as location and rent. CCCS also found that being near an MRT station brings in shoppers from its commuters.

Do it in Simpler.Run

Is there a free way to see the tap counts without code?

If the DataMall steps are more than you want to take on, Simpler.Run is a free way to see LTA’s taps by area. There is no account and nothing to sign up for. It calls each area a corner: one URA subzone, the smallest patch Singapore’s own planning map names, such as Ang Mo Kio Town Centre.

Type a six-digit postal code, a block and street, or the name of an MRT station or hawker centre, and it finds the corner. Simpler.Run shows how many people tap in and out on a working day at a corner’s stops, both directions. That is bus taps on every counted corner, plus rail fare-gate taps on 125 of them. Footfall sits beside rent, daytime workers, competitors, zoning, incomes and homes. Every number names what measured it and its date.

315 of its 332 corners carry a footfall figure. On 2 of them it is a weekend figure, and the card says so. Where a corner shows nothing, it is a gap on our side, not a measured zero. Taps are trips past a point, not customers through your door, so count at the door as well. Simpler.Run will not tell you whether the business works.

Find your corner → What Simpler.Run measures

Sources

Contains information from the Passenger Volume by Bus Stops sample in the LTA DataMall API User Guide, accessed on 29 September 2026 from LTA DataMall, which is made available under the terms of the Singapore Open Data Licence version 1.0.

Sources checked on 29 September 2026.