Measured walking-route studies around metro and rail stations before redesign
TL;DR Concoursa runs short, camera-based counting studies of how people actually reach a station - which gate they use, where they cross, where they wait for a ride and where they bunch. Metro corporations and rail agencies pay per station, before they spend crores on new entries or foot-over-bridges.
Most Indian transit riders finish their trip on foot. A 2023 survey of 7,200 metro commuters in Nagpur, Delhi and Bengaluru found walking and shared modes made up over 75% of last-mile trips in all three cities[1]. Yet the walk is often an afterthought. New Delhi railway station sits within 300 metres of metro and bus services but lacks proper walking links, and in Ahmedabad the nearest metro station is about 800 metres from the railway station with no marked pedestrian route[2].
When agencies fix this, they usually design from drawings and one-day manual counts. Nobody measures the desire lines people actually take, so a new FOB can end up beside the crossing everyone keeps using.
Concoursa sets up temporary cameras on poles or station buildings for two to four weeks across the 300–500 metre approach to one station. Software counts and tracks anonymous figures, never faces, and builds a map of the routes people take, along with peak-minute volumes at each gate, informal crossings, waiting clusters at feeder drop-offs and pinch points on footpaths.
The output is a design brief, not a dashboard. It ranks the five or six changes that would move the most people safely, such as a missing gate on the side most riders arrive from or a drop-off bay moved off the main walking line. After the works, Concoursa measures again so the agency can show what changed.
I reframed the seed, because a city-wide live pedestrian map has no clear buyer while agencies already tender station-area studies. This is a planning tool. It does not issue live crowd alerts or manage events.
Riders benefit, but the payer is the station owner or city body, meaning metro rail corporations, suburban rail agencies, smart-city SPVs and municipal road departments. Chennai Metro has asked for bids on a pedestrian-facility plan for the 500-metre zone around 41 stations[3], and Mumbai's rail agency is hiring a consultant to study passenger movement, FOBs and entries at stations linked to metro[4]. Concoursa can sell directly or as the measurement subcontractor to the planning firm that wins such work.
The buying signal is recent. Chennai Metro's station-area tender came in March 2026[3] and Mumbai's suburban integration study in August 2026[4]. Several metro networks opened their first lines in the last decade and are now retrofitting access. Cheap edge cameras and open-source person tracking make a multi-week count affordable where a manual team was not.
There is no public figure for what Indian agencies spend on station-area pedestrian studies. The narrowest signal is the tenders themselves - one Chennai package covers 41 stations[3], and Mumbai's covers an unspecified set of interchange stations[4]. Neither published a budget. Treat this as a services niche of a few hundred stations nationally, not a large software market.
Commercial pedestrian-simulation software models how passengers move through a planned station and was used on London's Bank-Monument upgrade[5]. It tests designs but does not count the street outside. A UK consultancy sells people-movement consulting for buildings, places and events[6]. In India, transport planning consultancies win the DPR tenders, but I found none selling repeatable measured counts of station approaches. The gap is field evidence that planners currently skip.
| Difficulty | Moderate (41/100) |
| Starting capital | ₹40–80 L |
| Time to launch | 4–6 months |
The tracking software is mostly solved. The work is in Indian conditions - mixed traffic, vendors on footpaths, monsoon glare, night lighting and permission to mount cameras on public land. Selling is slower still, because government buyers want empanelment, past projects and a planning partner they already trust.
No sector licence applies to counting pedestrians. What you need is permission to mount kit and a clean data setup.
Building this outside India? The categories above usually have a local equivalent, so check with your own regulator.
Don't let AI make the final design call. Safety on a busy road is an engineer's judgment, and bad camera angles or monsoon glare can quietly skew counts.
Want to work out the AI layer for Concoursa? Talk to Yash →
Here's what can go south -
I think this is a good fit if you come from transport planning or computer vision and can sell to government patiently. If you want a pure software subscription then it's a poor fit, because this is a measured-services business with software margins at best. First prove that one planning consultancy will pay for counts on a live station tender, and that your results change at least one design decision.
Plan for roughly ₹40–80 L, mostly cameras, software work and the months spent waiting on government buyers.
No sector licence. You need local permission to mount cameras and must follow the DPDP Act for any video of people.
Yes, transit agencies everywhere redesign station access. Check your local privacy law on street video and how agencies there buy studies.
The free Concoursa validation kit has the line-by-line capital breakdown, the effort scoring, the data-protection and permissions checklist, a 14-day validation sprint with pass/fail targets, a 90-day launch plan, 10 interview questions for agencies and planners, and 5 assumptions to test. Download the kit →
Thinking about building Concoursa or something close to it? The make-or-break work is getting onto the first station tender as the measurement partner, and that's the kind of thing I help founders plan. If you need a hand, you know where to find me. Talk to Yash →
For illustration only. Names are fictional and ideas hypothetical; sourced facts are real but may be out of date. Nothing here is legal, financial or professional advice, and Yash Khatri is not personally liable for any use of it. Read the full disclaimer.