FOOT TRAFFIC DATA API

Know When Places Are Busy

Public venue Visitor patterns and live busyness data

Trusted by data teams and researchers at

CAPABILITIES

Built for developers & city builders

Mix forecasts, live signals, and flexible filters to power any location-aware experience.

Venue visitor patterns

  • Hourly Predictions: Get relative foot traffic percentages (0–100%) for every hour of the week.
  • Peak Analysis: Automatically identify daily high points, quietest hours, and peak intensity.
  • Visitor Flow: Use "Surge analysis" to pinpoint exactly when most people arrive and leave a venue.
Foot traffic forecast heatmap

Live Busyness

Compare real-time activity against the average to flag surges or quiet periods instantly.

Live busyness example

Venue Search

Find and add any venue worldwide using natural language queries like “McDonald’s in Manhattan” or “Brunch places in Paris”.

Discover the Pulse of the City

Don’t just find a venue—find the right vibe at the right time. Use the Venue Filter to spot hotspots, identify quiet gems, and react to live deviations from the normal forecast.

  • Time-travel filtering: “Friday at 10 PM”
  • Venue categories: BREWERY, MUSEUM, SUPERMARKET, and more.
  • Granular filters: coordinates, rating, reviews, dwell time, and more.
Now with AI code support

Developers

One API call away to make your app smarter

Transform how users interact with the real world.
Don’t just search for a location—find the right location.

Use our advanced filtering to programmatically find venues based on:

  • foot traffic intensity
  • geography
  • day, hour
  • reviews, ratings
  • business types
  • dwell time (visitor duration)

Combine these filters with live data and forecasts to answer complex questions like
“Where is the best vibe right now?” or “When is the gym quietest?”—all in a single API call.

bash — API Client
/forecasts?venue_name=McDonalds&venue_address=Ocean+Ave+San+Francisco
Response:
{
  "foot_traffic_percentage": [
    5, 20, 35, 55, 70, 85, 90, 90,
    85, 80, 80, 85, 85, 80, 65, 50,
    40, 35, 30, 20, 5, 0, 5, 5
  ],
  "day_info": {
    "day_text": "Friday",
    "day_mean": 56,
    "day_max": 89
  },
  "busy_hours": [10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20],
  "quiet_hours": [1, 2, 3, 6, 7],
  "peak_hours": [
    {
      "peak_start": 9,
      "peak_max": 12,
      "peak_end": 21,
      "peak_intensity": 4
    }
  ],
  "venue_info": {
    "venue_name": "McDonald's",
    "venue_address": "1201 Ocean Ave San Francisco, CA 94112 United States",
  }
}
venues/filter?busy_min=50&types=BAR&day_int=4&lat=37.7882488&lng=-122.4370937&radius=10000&reviews_min=500&rating_min=4
Response:
{
  "venues": [
    {
      "venue_name": "Charmaine's Rooftop Bar & Lounge",
      "venue_address": "1100 Market St San Francisco, CA 94102 United States",
      "venue_type": "BAR",
      "rating": 4.4,
      "reviews": 1194,
      "foot_traffic_percentage": [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,35,50,65,80,85,80,70,50,0,0,0,0,0,0]
    },
    { "...": "Other venues hidden, see docs" }
  ],
  "venues_n": 231,
  "window": { "day_window": "Friday 6AM until Saturday 5AM" },
  "status": "OK"
}
/live?venue_name=Eiffel+Tower&venue_address=Champ+de+Mars,Paris,France
Response:
{
  "analysis": {
    "venue_forecasted_busyness": 60,
    "venue_live_busyness": 85,
    "venue_live_forecasted_delta": 25,
    "venue_live_busyness_available": true
  },
  "venue_info": {
    "venue_name": "Eiffel Tower",
    "venue_current_localtime_iso": "Friday 2024-05-10 09:15PM",
    "venue_address": "Champ de Mars, 5 Av. Anatole France, 75007 Paris, France"
  }
}
/forecasts/peaks?venue_name=Times+Square&venue_address=Manhattan,NY,USA
Response:
{
  "analysis": {
    "peak_hours": [
      {
        "peak_start_12h": "6PM",
        "peak_max_12h": "9PM",
        "peak_start_in": "1 hour and 45 minutes",
        "peak_max_in": "4 hour and 45 minutes",
        "peak_intensity": 5
      }
    ]
  },
  "status": "OK"
}
/venues/search?q=popular+museums+in+London&num=20
Response:
[
  {
    "venue_name": "British Museum",
    "venue_address": "Great Russell St, London WC1B 3DG, United Kingdom",
    "venue_id": "ven_513871...",
    "venue_foot_traffic_forecast": [
      {
        "day_info": { "day_text": "Friday", "day_max": 92 },
        "day_raw": [0,0,0,0,10,25,45,65,85,92,88,75,60,40,20,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]
      }
    ]
  },
  {
    "venue_name": "Natural History Museum",
    "venue_address": "Cromwell Rd, South Kensington, London SW7 5BD",
    "venue_id": "ven_624982...",
    "venue_foot_traffic_forecast": "..."
  }
]
HOW IT WORKS
BestTime Infographic

Forecasts + live signals, normalized 0–100

BestTime provides hourly foot traffic forecasts for each day of the week and (where available) live busyness you can compare against the forecast.

  • Foot Traffic Forecasts are relative percentages (0–100%), wherein 100% indicates the peak of the week.
  • Live busyness highlights surges or quiet periods in real time.
  • Filters help you find venues by predicted busyness, location, day/time, ratings, reviews, and venue category.

Common workflows

Discover venues
Search and filter venues to match a user’s intent.
Forecast busy times
Pick the best hour/day to visit, staff, or plan promotions.
Visualize on heatmaps
Compare neighborhoods or city areas at a glance.
BENEFITS

Foot traffic data that improves decisions

Turn “where” into “where + when” for better recommendations, planning, and operations.

City guides and recommendations

Auto-curated city guides

Build discovery experiences like “busy bars near me” or “quiet museums this morning”.

Avoid crowds and queues

Avoid crowds

Help users choose the best day and time to avoid queues at attractions, venues, and stores.

Staffing and resource planning

Resource scheduling

Use expected peaks and quiet hours to plan staffing and reduce waste.

Optimize occupancy rates

Optimize occupancy

Balance supply and demand with insights into predicted visitor patterns.

VIDEO

See BestTime in action

A quick look at the platform and Radar heatmaps.

Platform overview

Forecasts, live busyness, and venue insights in one workflow.

Radar heatmaps

Find busy/quiet areas and filter venues by time, day, type, and more.

GET STARTED

Start building in minutes

Create a free test account, explore the tools, then integrate the API.

1
Get a free test account
We provide limited free credits so you can test quickly.
2
Try the tools
Use Radar to search & filter venues and explore heatmaps.
3
Integrate the API
Use forecast, live, and filter endpoints in your own app.
4
Pick a plan
Scale usage when you’re ready.

Popular use cases

Travel & city guides
Recommend quiet/busy places at the right time.
DOOH & marketing
Time campaigns to match real-world activity.
Staffing & operations
Schedule teams based on expected peaks.
Analytics dashboards
Add a real-world activity layer to location data.
USE CASES

Powered by forecasts, live data, and filters

A few examples of what teams build with BestTime.

Consumer-focused apps

Help users discover the right venue at the right time.

Read more

Optimize digital outdoor advertising

Schedule ads when nearby venues attract your audience.

Read more

Staffing forecasts

Allocate resources based on expected demand.

Read more

Measure impact of promotions

Compare live activity against the historical baseline.

TOOLS

Explore with the website tools

Use the tools, or get the same data through the software API.

Radar tool venue search and filters

Radar tool

Search & filter venues by busyness, location, day/time, rating, and type — and visualize on heatmaps.

Try Radar
Forecast demo

Forecast demo

Generate a forecast by venue name/address and explore peaks, quiet hours, and day-over-day patterns.

Try forecast
City guide demo

City guide demo

Browse busy/quiet places by country and city to see what’s possible for consumer apps.

Open demo
TUTORIALS

Learn by example

Quick guides to get value from BestTime tools and the API.

Tutorial: Website tools

Beginner’s guide: website tools

From finding venues to analyzing patterns with Radar.

Tutorial: Developers API

Beginner’s guide: developers API

Make your first forecasts and queries and ship them into your app.

Tutorial: Venue search and filtering

Search and filter venues

Build “busy bars tonight” and “quiet supermarkets now” experiences.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Quick answers to common questions about coverage, forecasts, and live data.

BestTime provides relative foot traffic for public venues (e.g., bars, restaurants, supermarkets, malls, parks, beaches, museums, and other public places). Values are normalized from 0–100% relative to a venue’s peak activity.

We provide forecasts (and where data density allows, live busyness) for venues across 150+ countries worldwide.

Yes. Create a free test account to explore the API and website tools. No credit card required to start.

A forecast estimates how busy a venue will be for each hour of a day (and across the week) based on historical visitor patterns. Values are displayed as percentages from 0–100%, relative to the venue’s weekly peak.

Live data indicates real-time activity expressed as a percentage, comparable to the forecasted baseline for the current local day and hour.

Foot traffic is derived from anonymized, aggregated location signals. BestTime provides only aggregated outputs and does not expose personal identifiers through the API.

Not always. A venue needs sufficient visitor volume for reliable forecasts, and live data availability typically requires even higher volume.

BestTime focuses on relative, normalized foot traffic (0–100%) rather than absolute visitor counts. Historical data is not provided as a dedicated export; you can store and analyze values over time if needed.

Yes. You can integrate the data into your website or apps using the API, and you can also use the website tools for exploration and analysis.

Start predicting foot traffic today

Join teams building smarter city guides, travel apps, staffing models, and analytics dashboards.

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