World City Traffic On-Line

Ponder World City Traffic -- On-Line

Click to add your city's traffic cam here?

-- TOOLKIT --

It has long been our contention that one of the critical things holding us back from creating better, fairer and more sustainable transportation systems relates to our collective inability to imagine the cities that we would like to live in. It is, in fact, a double bind. We are, to try a phrase, literally blinded by the present as we look to the future.

To this end one of the main themes behind the New Mobility approach is that we need to learn to look more clearly at what we have, to see it for what it is, and then to see if we can move beyond that to something that is better and more sustainable. The several hundred views of traffic around the world that you have here provides food for thought. Here you will find a selection of real time views of traffic on city streets which provide some pretty interesting one-click coverage of how things look today in a huge variety of settings around the world. (Note: Some of these are official traffic sites, some with streaming real time video, others just cams that someone has aimed at a street. That too offers pause for reflection.)

If you spend a bit of time pondering these images, including at different times of the day and on different days of the week, several rather interesting things may jump out at you. For example, in city after city, country after country, how few hours of the day all these expensive roads are in fact being used to anything approaching capacity (and clearly beyond if you look closely). Hmm. That is worth at least a passing thought in our present context here.

And if only you could zoom in on all those cars on the street during the peak periods, you would see that in most of them there is just one driver, taking up something on the order of one hundred square meters of scarce taxpayer funded city real estate (by the time you factor in reasonable spacing, parking, etc.). Hmm,

Which brings us to the following question which is at the heart of this entire cooperative effort: Do we need to keep on building roads to solve our mobility problems? Or to get better at using the huge infrastructures that we have already put into place at enormous cost to the taxpayer.

Useful downloads

You may need one or more of the following to view these cams:

Note: You may wish to make sure that you have enabled pop-ups on your browser, since some of the sites require them to be able to deliver their images.

World Traffic Camera Inventory:

(It's still the Net and work in progress, so from time to time some of these sites can go badly wrong. So if you get nothing in one place, keep moving. And let us know if you encounter a problem. Perhaps we will be able to do something about it)

And kindest thanks to . . .

When we first started assembling these traffic camera links in the late nineties, they were few in number and easy to spot through out work and watching brief in the field. But times have changes, Moore is still working at his Law, and the numbers are fast exploding. So we are no longer able to do this on our own.

This time around we owe many words of thanks for help and tips in bringing together and most recently (1 Oct. 2005) updating this collection. Among others, kindest thanks to:

Matti Tiainen, Finland, (http://www.pcuf.fi/~mtiainen/eurocam.html);
World Webcam Directory - http://barusa.tripod.com/webcams/intlwx.htm
Earth Cams' traffic section at http://search.earthcam.com/search_cam.php?offset=0&cat=TRA; the European Webcam Index at http://www.webcam-index.com/Europe/
Tommy's List of Live Cam Worldwide - http://www.rt66.com/~ozone/countries.htm
TrafficLook - http://www.trafficlook.com/
Yahoo Traffic Cams - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/traffic-cams/
World Cams, http://www.wjct.org/world_cam/

These sites offer a good starting place, but in order to create a focused collection such as this a fair amount of leg work is needed to comb through the woods to find views which are relevant in our case, get rid of the (many) dead links, etc. That said if you wish to take this further yourself, they provide a great place to start. (And if you come up with anything interesting for us, please do share your discoveries with us.)