Austin's traffic cameras, from the I-35 upper deck to Congress Avenue
At 19:19 local last night the IH-35 at Manor Road upper deck camera was looking south along the top level, one pickup coming up the inside lane with its lights flaring, and the lower deck running under its own lamps across the right of the frame. Austin stacks its interstate two storeys high through the middle of town, and there is a camera on each level. Manor Lower sits 68 ft from it, by the distance the camera page works out. Open the pair side by side around 17:30 on a weekday and you can see which deck is actually moving, which is not a thing a traffic map will tell you.
A search for Austin traffic cameras lands on two separate networks that look nothing like each other. One belongs to the state and watches the freeway. The other belongs to the city and watches intersections, and it is much the bigger of the two.
The state's cameras run the length of I-35
Counted on the Austin hub today, 83 of the live cameras there are named IH-35 at something. They start at the Hays County line, come up through San Marcos past the Blanco River, through Kyle and Buda, over Onion Creek and the Ben White interchange, across the river at East Riverside, up the decks and out to 51st Street. That is most of the corridor people mean when they say the traffic was bad. TxDOT publishes the same feeds on its own map at drivetexas.org, without the permanent links.
The frames are small and they say so. IH-35 at 6th Street and Manor Upper both came back 720x480 when I pulled them at 01:20 UTC today; SH-71 at Presidential, out by the airport, and IH-35 at SH-45 on the southern edge are 352x240. Every one carries the department's star watermark in the corner and its own date and time along the bottom. Small is fine for this. You are counting lanes of brake lights, not reading plates.
Three I would open first:
- IH-35 at 6th Street gives you the mainlanes, the frontage road and the downtown skyline in one frame, which makes it the clearest read on whether the centre of town has jammed. Last night at 19:20 the frontage road was clear and the upper deck was not.
- IH-35 at Onion Creek is where traffic coming north from San Antonio arrives. It is the one to watch on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, when that stack starts at lunchtime rather than at five.
- SH-71 at Presidential covers the road into the airport, which is the only question anyone asks of it, and it answers in one glance.
The city's cameras, and the clock in the corner
Austin Transportation and Public Works runs its own set and publishes the list as open data. The dataset held 1,009 rows when I read it today: 823 marked TURNED_ON, 122 DESIRED, which means planned and not built, 30 REMOVED and 34 VOID. The catalogue entry is plain about what they are not, too: "video is not recorded or retained of daily traffic" (data.gov). They are there to be looked at live and then forgotten.
I asked all 823 of the working ones for a picture at 01:22 UTC this morning. 821 handed one back. The two that did not are both at Cameron Road and Ferguson Drive, which is a single junction with a pair of camera ids against it.
These frames are 1920x1080, which is nine times the pixels of the TxDOT ones, and each has the date, the time and the junction name burnt into the bottom edge. That last detail is the useful one, because it tells you how old the picture in front of you is. KUT reported in 2017 that the stills update once a minute. On a quiet Sunday evening it is slower than that: I pulled Congress Avenue at 11th Street every twenty seconds from 01:17 to 01:25 UTC and the picture changed twice, at 01:19:22 and 01:24:12. The frame I saved in between was stamped 19:19:04 local, about a minute and a half before I got it.
Four city cameras worth the click
- Congress Avenue at 11th Street looks down Congress from the Capitol end, with the towers stacked up behind. At 19:19 last night it had an emergency vehicle crossing 11th with its lights going and the avenue otherwise empty. In daylight this is the postcard view of the street.
- 6th Street at Red River sits at the east end of the bar strip. Worth opening late on a Friday, when the street closes to cars and fills with people instead.
- Red River at Clyde Littlefield Drive is beside the stadium. At night it drops to infrared and a single streetlight blooms across half the frame, so this one is a daytime camera: open it when 100,000 people are trying to leave at once.
- Barton Springs Road at Stratford Drive is the way into Zilker Park, and it earns its place every time something big is on in the park.
One honest limit. Of the 19 live cameras here with MoPac in the name, counted today, every one is a city camera at a cross street or on a frontage road, like MoPac at La Crosse Avenue, so the expressway gets watched from the side rather than from above the lanes.
What we do with them
We re-fetch all 681 live Austin cameras on a cycle and keep the result of every check, which is what the uptime line on each page is counting: Manor Upper was at 100% over its last eight checks when I read its page today. A camera that stops answering, or starts answering with the same frozen picture, comes off the hub rather than sitting there looking live.
The next thing I want from this set is a week of Thanksgiving. The Onion Creek camera and the pair at the decks should show the southbound stack building on the Wednesday afternoon, and I will post what the frames actually look like against the usual Wednesday. If you know the Austin corridors better than I do and there is a camera on this list that is pointed at nothing, tell me and I will take it off.