Frankfurt's Zeil still busiest shopping street in Germany
Property adviser JLL's annual survey of Germany's most frequented shopping streets has confirmed that Frankfurt's Zeil has defended its position as the liveliest shopping street in the country. In second and third place come Munich, followed by Cologne, Hannover and Dortmund.
On a busy Saturday the Zeil in Frankfurt counts 14,390 pedestrians an hour. In second place is the Kaufingerstrasse in Munich (14,155) followed by the Neuhauser Strasse, likewise in Munich (13,455).
Next comes Cologne's Schildergasse (13,040) which is also represented in the top 10 by Hohen Strasse (8thplace, with 9,425 pedestrians), with Hannover's Georgstrasse in Hannover (10,985), Westhellenweg in Dortmund (10,180), the Königstrasse in Stuttgart (9,145). Düsseldorf's Flingerstrasse (7thplace, 9,670) and Schadowstrasse (10thplace, 9,130).
Notable is that only four of the ten most frequented shopping streets (Frankfurt, Dortmund and the two Munich streets) have been able to maintain or improve on their 5-year average. The other six streets in the Top 10 have all lost footfall.
In Stuttgart, for example, the Stiftstrasse which links the Königstrasse with the new Dorotheenquartier Centre has seen its footfall almost double. The national average has sunk by about 1% from 724,000 pedestrians to 718,880 over a comparable time period in the larger cities.
JLL points out that highly frequented streets located beside each other tend to benefit each other significantly, as common sense would suggest. This enables the larger cities to hold their overall footfall at or above past levels, whereas the smaller regional towns are losing out in the battle for consumers.
JLL carried out their survey in 174 German towns and cities on April 14 this year between 13.00 and 16.00. This form of field research is not without its critics, as they inevitably cannot take account of weather conditions, local events or traffic or building site hindrances. New methods of measuring footfall, such as measuring by laser or smartphone frequency, are being tested but have not yet been fully adopted.
According to Helge Scheunemann, JLL' s head of research, "The method we use to count footfall is of course just a momentary snapshot", but the manual method remains perfectly valid, requiring as it does no special permits for counting equipment from local stores, and no complications with Germany's very prickly privacy and data protection regulations.