If you have the time and temper to spend a bit of time looking at these images, including at different times of the day and on different days of the week, several rather interesting things in our present context 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 pondering a bit 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.).

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.

World Traffic Camera Inventory:

(It's still the Net, 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.)

1. Anchorage, Alaska, USA *
2. Barcelona, Spain **
3. Belfast, North Ireland *
4. Belgrade, Serbia *
5. Bilbao, Spain (in own window)*
6. Boston *
7. Buenos Aires, Argentina *
8. Central Israel *
9. Dublin *
10. Geneva, Switzerland *
11. Gothenburg, Sweden *
12. Helsinki and region, Finland *
13. Hobart, Australia *
14. Hong Kong, China *
15. Hong Kong 2, China *
16. Honolulu, USA *
17. Istanbul, Turkey *
18. Kuala Lumpur, Maylasia (streaming video)**
19. Lapland, Finland **
20. Lisbon, Portugal *

21. London, U.K. **

22. Lucerne, Switzerland *
23. Madrid, Spain *
24. Manila
25. Maryland *
26. Memphis Tennessee
27. Mexico City, Mexico
28. Mexico City 2, Mexico
29. Montreal
30. Nashville *
31. New York City ** (streaming video)
32. Nottingham, U.K. *
33. Ontario, Canada*
34. Osaka, Japan *
35. Paris, France ** (streaming video)
36. Perth, Australia *
37. Prague, Czech Republic *
38. Raleigh, N.C., USA *
39. Reykjavík
40. Rio de Janeiro
41. San Sebastián-Donostia, Spain *
42. Santiago
43. Sao Paulo (streaming video)
44. Seattle
45. Seoul, Korea **
46. Stockholm, Sweden *
47. Szegeden
48. Taipei
49. Teheran, Iran
50. Tokyo, Japan (real time)
51. Toronto, Canada *
52. Vienna 1, Austria *
53. Vienna 2, Austria *
54. Vilnius, Lithuania *
55. Vladivostock
56. Warsaw, Poland *
57. Washington State *
58. Weillington, New Zealand *
59. Wuppertal, Germany *
60. Zurich, Switzerland *

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Reflections: on what we can see

It has long been our contention that one of the 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.

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. Does it?