Dublin has adopted Springboard's electronic footfall monitoring service to provide continuous, automated, footfall counts throughout the City Centre. Counts are collected hourly - 24/7 - and are delivered online on a daily basis.

Springboard has been monitoring pedestrian flows in the City since November 2004, and has identified that Grafton's Street reputation as the busiest location in the City has been upheld with an average flow of nearly 600,000 per week. Indeed, the strength of Grafton Street is reinforced by the fact that it has a higher pedestrian flow than any other regional city in the British Isles - the closest to it is Coventry Street in London's West End with a weekly flow 580,000 per week.

Dublin's exceptional performance can be put into perspective by reference to Springboard's Regional City Benchmark which tracks footfall continuously in the UK's regional cities. This identifies a far lower average weekly flow, across all other regional cities in the UK, of around 340,000 and there is also a significant variation in footfall between cities - from as high as 580,000 in London to as low as 200,000 per week in Bristol (Broadmead).

Whilst footfall varies around the Dublin City Centre, it is still very high in all of its key streets, with weekly flows in excess of 400,000 in Henry Street-Mary Street and 350,000 in O'Connell Street.

Diane Wehrle, Marketing Director at Springboard, says that "The introduction of Springboard's service in Dublin has meant that the City is able to provide accurate and consistent monitoring of the effectiveness of its marketing, and to demonstrate to Dublin's businesses the true value of its efforts. For example, the number of visitors to Dublin increased by19% on St Patrick's Day this year compared with the same day in the previous week."