Hwy 17 at Laurel Curve before dawn, and eight more cameras anyone can open
At 06:08 PDT this morning the Highway 17 camera at Laurel Curve was showing a pale rock cut above the lanes, a guard rail, and a red smear where one car had gone through the bend while the shutter was open. That camera pulls a new frame every 30 seconds, and the weeks either side of the clocks changing are when it earns its keep: the fog sits in the gap between Scotts Valley and the summit, and the road over to San Jose is either clear or it is not, depending on which side of the ridge you are standing on.
Thirty-five more are live in Santa Cruz alone, and the four at the bottom of this post are further up the bay, in Mountain View, El Cerrito and the hills above Los Altos. Every one is published by the agency that runs the road, which is the whole of the trick. Caltrans puts the frame on the open internet, and a person in Santa Cruz, a traffic desk in Oakland and a camera directory all get the same picture in the same second.
The five between the summit and the wharf
The Santa Cruz hub listed 36 live cameras when I loaded it at 13:10 UTC on 2026-10-25. These five are the ones I would keep open on a Sunday morning, with what each was showing when I pulled it just after six, local time.
- Laurel Curve, high on the Santa Cruz side of the 17, framed on the northbound lanes and the cut. The first camera to tell you the summit has gone grey.
- South of Pasatiempo Drive sits at the Fishhook, where Highways 1 and 17 come together. At 06:08 the retaining wall on the right was lit orange, a line of overhead signs stood out at the top of the frame, and one car was coming down with its lights on. We have this row named for the junction and Caltrans captions the frame "17 at South of Pasatiempo Dr", so you will see both names for the same view.
- North of Ocean Street, the exit people take for the boardwalk and the wharf. In the dark it is mostly one set of headlights blown out across four lanes, which tells you how little traffic there is before seven.
- West of 41st Avenue, six lanes and a lamp standard, with the tail lights of a single lorry in the left-hand lane at 06:07. On a weekday this is the one that shows you the Soquel queue before you commit to it.
- Bay Avenue and Porter Street looks down the Capitola stretch, with the lit forecourt of a dealership filling the right of the frame and the trees of the neighbourhood behind.
None of these is a scenic camera and that is rather the point. They were installed so that a traffic engineer could look at a road, and because they are published, anyone else can look at the road too.
What Santa Cruz voted on in January
The other kind of camera in these towns does not work that way. Flock Safety's plate readers photograph the back of your car, read the number and keep it, and there is no page where you can watch the frame. Santa Cruz's council voted 6-1 to terminate its Flock contract on 13 January 2026, which KQED reported the next day as the first termination in California; the contract had been due to run to 27 March, and the vote allowed an exit from 12 February. Mountain View dropped plate readers altogether, and El Cerrito and Los Altos Hills have pulled back too, in KQED's reporting of 19 October 2026. San Jose kept its network of nearly 500.
The company has had a hard autumn. Reuters reported on 9 October that it planned to shed about 18% of its staff, roughly 270 people, after a voluntary separation programme in September; TechCrunch wrote it up the same day with the company's answer, that "this was a voluntary program, not a layoff", and put the installed fleet at over 100,000 plate readers in the US. I would not read the cuts as the backlash landing. The buyout came first, Flock disputes the framing, and nobody outside the company can see the headcount. What is measurable is the public mood: a Reuters poll in September found 47% of Americans did not want the cameras in their community against 38% who did, the figures KQED cites in the piece above.
We do not index plate readers and will not. The line we draw is whether the operator publishes the frame for anyone to look at, which is why a Caltrans camera on the 17 is in and a reader on a pole in Capitola is not.
Four more worth the click
- US-101 at North Shoreline Boulevard in Mountain View is up high and looking over the rooftops, so at 06:08:09 by the camera's own clock you get the street lamps of the whole flat and a dark purple band where the sky was starting. The best of this lot at dawn.
- SR-85 at Evelyn Avenue, a minute away, is three empty lanes of tarmac and a lane marking, and at 06:09:04 that was all it was. Some published cameras are pointed at nothing in particular. It is still better to be able to see that for yourself.
- San Pablo Avenue at Central Avenue, outside El Cerrito Plaza BART, had an empty crosswalk, a green light and a lit shopfront at 05:59:08. It refreshes on a slower cycle than the Caltrans rows, about every 150 seconds.
- Los Altos Hills Southwest is the one non-road camera here, a hillside view with the house lights scattered across it and one yard light burning at 06:04:46. Come back to this one in the hour after sunrise.
The count behind all this: 131,526 cameras were live on the map across 160 countries when our fleet table was computed at 13:09 UTC today, and every one of them is there because somebody chose to publish it.
What I have not got is a list of which agencies publish and which keep the feed inside the building. Caltrans publishes nearly everything; plenty of city traffic departments publish nothing, and I cannot tell from outside whether that is policy or an old server. If you know of a county or a state that changed its mind in either direction this year, I would like to hear which.