Pedestrian and Cycle counter API for Dublin Region

Dublin City Council cc-by · dataset listing last updated 2025-06-19T18:31:50.405425

Pedestrians dominate Dublin's sensor network, but location data quality issues affect more than one in five counters

Why this matters

Dublin City Council has set an ambitious goal that every resident should be within five minutes or 500 metres of a walking or cycling route, making reliable sensor data crucial for planning and evaluating infrastructure. When data quality issues affect more than one in five counters, planners risk making decisions with incomplete or inaccurate evidence about where people actually walk and cycle.

Pedestrian-only counters account for 36% of all sensors (47 of 131), compared to just 20 dedicated cycle counters and 19 combined pedestrian-cycle sensors
21.4% of longitude values (28 of 131 counters) fall outside normal statistical bounds, suggesting data quality problems with location recording
Setup dates show installation surges in specific months: 11 counters were installed on the same date in February 2019, and 9 more on the same date in August 2020, indicating coordinated rollout phases
Over one-third of all records (34.35%) contain missing data across all five fields, meaning the dataset omits key information for many registered sensors

'Pedestrians' accounts for 36% of all User Type values (47 of 131).

View underlying data

Category	Value
Pedestrians	47
Cyclists	20
Pedestrians/Cyclists	19

28 of 131 Longitude values (21.4%) are statistical outliers (outside 1.5× IQR).

View underlying data

Statistic	Value
min	-6.422
median	-6.259
max	53.344
count	86

A caveat worth knowing: The publisher acknowledges existing data quality issues with some sensors (specifically naming Baggot Street Upper/Mespil Road/Bank), and the high proportion of statistical outliers in longitude values suggests broader location accuracy problems that may affect mapping or spatial analysis

Source & method

Dataset on data.gov.ie: https://data.gov.ie/dataset/pedestrian-and-cycle-counter-api-for-dublin-region

API endpoint used: https://data.smartdublin.ie/dataset/666ac025-f0ba-47b3-ad12-63faf1b1d4d2/resource/f80d1ec3-e915-4ef0-988f-e3304b97dd37/download/ecocounter-locations.csv

Licence: cc-by

Selected automatically — interestingness score 80/100 (has a time dimension, multiple numeric fields, and/or a categorical breakdown; see the project's scoring method for details).

Published 2026-08-10T10:08:30.653389+00:00.

Generated automatically by Ireland Open Data Analyst — every quantitative claim above was checked against a computed value before publishing.