Thursday 3 March 2016

Smile - you may be on camera!

CCTV is everywhere, of course. And the Busway is no exception. But the output from only a small proportion of CCTV cameras is fed to the web here in Cambridge. (Compare this to, say, Washington DC, where all of the traffic cameras feed images to the web.) What's perhaps more surprising is that, in Cambridgeshire, such web output is limited almost exclusively to the Busway and its associated Park and Ride facilities.

Interestingly, less that half of those feeds (just 19) are included in the County Council's own listing:
http://voyager.cambridgeshire.gov.uk/CCTV.aspx

Once again, I'm indebted to Richard Taylor, who discovered that there are no fewer than 43 such feeds operating, and has listed them all on his own blog:
http://www.rtaylor.co.uk/cambscc-cambridge-cctv.html

(The list appears below the latest output from each of those cameras within the City.)

I would draw your attention to Richard's comments about the inconsistency/illogicality in the County Council's labelling of its cameras - it sometimes requires a fairly detailed knowledge of the location to work out exactly what you're looking at and from where.

These are snapshots, and not continuous live feeds. Images seem to be updated every 5 minutes. If old images are archived publicly, I've no idea where.
Remember, too, that these aren't fixed cameras, so the angle and breadth of coverage from any one camera can change (the temporary speed limit at Trumpington was more obvious earlier this week than it is at the time of writing, for example).

Since it's over 4 months old, I've rechecked Richard's list in the past few days, and all of the links seem to be still active. I was unable to discover any new ones, although there are plenty of unused IP addresses in the range covered by the active feeds.

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