What is their use if they don't record anything? Just to measure current traffic levels? I assumed they were all used as ALPRs. I've seen some cameras sprouting up in my small town and it worries me.
They are essentially a public live traffic report so that the news agencies are not running helicopters amok to get the same footage; and many of the cameras are in tight locations where it would be hard to fly helicopters or drones without irritating neighbors or being a danger to public safety.
Just because NYCTMC doesn't record doesn't mean NYC Police, or any other group doesn't... Could have been intentionally coordinated or not at the beginning, but it almost certainly is recorded by several players now
The small(ish) town I grew up in started using cameras a dozen or more years ago.
They get used with computer vision to control and coordinate traffic lights (sometimes with the help of inductive loops in the pavement, and sometimes without).
In this particular case: They don't record anything, and their ISM 900MHz backhauls don't have enough bandwidth for centralized video anyway.
(Sources: Background in RF, and I used to hang out with the city employee who took care of this system along with most other things relating to traffic lights there.)
When I'm heading to New Jersey, I often check the Holland Tunnel entrance camera to see whether there's a jam. The intersection only flows well if there's a traffic cop there, which factors into route decisions.
The cameras in your small town are probably https://www.flocksafety.com/ , which are definitely ALPRs. The NYC traffic cameras are to a great extent an anomaly from a bygone era; cameras installed at an exact point in time where real-time monitoring sans analysis or recording made sense.
Isn't the most likely outcome here that the city will simply stop allowing public access to the camera feeds?
This feels like it has the potential to be a "this is why we can't have nice things" outcome even though I don't think the app author is doing anything wrong.
What's the point of making a thing avilable to the public online if you're only going to pull it offline as soon as regular people start using it? I'm sure there are corporations and data brokers quietly collecting info on us using every scrap of publicly avilable data including traffic cams, but the moment regular folks start getting in on the fun and they post a pic of themselves being surveilled on twitter suddenly it's time to shut everything down?
If it's a problem as soon as the average American starts using something, it's probably better if those resources stop being made available period.
The data collection isn't even quiet. There's an entire cottage industry of companies that scrape these traffic cam feeds, store everything for x numbers of months in low-cost cloud vaults (e.g. glacier) and then offer lawyers/clients in traffic disputes access to footage that may have captured an accident for exorbitant rates. It's a remarkable little ecosystem of privatized mass surveillance.
>but the moment regular folks start getting in on the fun and they post a pic of themselves being surveilled on twitter suddenly it's time to shut everything down?
There's a pretty big difference between using it for its intended purpose (ie. monitoring traffic), and the alleged behavior that the department of transportation was opposed to.
>Office of Legal Affairs recently sent a cease-and-desist letter to Morry Kolman, the artist behind the project, charging that the TCP "encourages pedestrians to violate NYC traffic rules and engage in dangerous behavior."
> What's the point of making a thing avilable to the public online if you're only going to pull it offline as soon as regular people start using it?
Regular people have been using it for decades, though? Scrolling through the comments here are plenty of people who have discovered and put these cameras to use in their daily lives.
Something being freely provided does not inherently grant consumers the right to do with it whatever they please. The producers, being the one freely providing the things, seem well within their rights to set limits on its usage, no? Sure, sometimes things are freely produced with the express point being that they can be used without limitations, but this isn't an inherent property of the thing being freely available.
I mean, why else do we have so many different open source licensing models?
> If it's a problem as soon as the average American starts using something, it's probably better if those resources stop being made available period.
Average American probably won't be using it.
This seems to be the hole in Kant's categorical imperative[0] - plenty of useful things fail the test of universality, because there isn't one class, or two classes, but three classes of people: those who find some use for a thing, those who don't and thus don't care, and then those who have no use for the thing but don't like it anyway. And in the past century or so, thanks to the role of mass media, that third class is ruling the world.
And so...
> but the moment regular folks start getting in on the fun and they post a pic of themselves being surveilled on twitter suddenly it's time to shut everything down?
Yes, it is. It's how this has been playing out time and again - once the attention seekers, and people with overactive imagination wrt. dystopias, and maybe the few with some actually reasonable objections join forces, it's better to shut the thing down as soon as possible, to minimize the amount of time your name can be found on the front pages of major newspapers. At that point, there's little hope to talk things out and perhaps rescue the project in some form - outraged public does not do calm or rational, and if you somehow survive the first couple days and the public still cares, you're destined to become a new ball in the political pinball machine. With your name or life on the line, it's usually much easier to cut your losses than to stand on principle, especially for something that's inconsequential in the grander scheme of things.
One by one, we're losing nice things - not as much because they're abused, but mostly because there's always some performative complainers ready to make a scene. We won't be getting nice things back until our cultural immunity catches up, until we inoculate ourselves against the whining.
[1] - Cardinal Richelieu's "Give me six lines", though the (apparently) more accurate version from https://history.stackexchange.com/a/28484 is even better: "with two lines of a man's handwriting, an accusation could be made against the most innocent, because the business can be interpreted in such a way, that one can easily find what one wishes." More boring than malevolent, and thus that much more real; it reads like a HN comment.
That is what happened to the local feed for the city I live in. Their mapping data was trash. I went through fixed the GPS, found the typical focalized center of frame, built a basic frontend, and then they shut it all down.
I found the dude that ran it and emailed back and forth with him for a few years. They made excuses about how it is an IT issue.
A bit tangential, but in Poland we also had such traffic cameras with public access (it wasn't a live feed, but a snapshot updated every minute or so). It was provided by a company which won a lot of tenders for IT infrastructure around roads (https://www.traxelektronik.pl/pogoda/kamery/).
What is interesting to me is that the public access to the cameras has been blocked a few months after the war in Ukraine started. For a few months I could watch the large convoys of equipment going towards Ukraine, and my personal theory is that so did the MoD of Russia. I haven't seen any reports about that, just my personal observation.
Would have been a good opportunity to inject misinformation after they noticed (assuming it's what happened)... Convoy passing by? Quick, splice in alternative footage that has equivalent traffic/weather conditions. (Or an infinite convoy to scare them)
Why does NYC even care? This tendency to govern in a controlling way is not just weird but plain unethical. I hope this goes viral and embarrasses them.
NYC government is peculiar, in that its size and scope is like a US state, but it also subsumes the functions of US cities and counties. The closest comparison in the US is probably LA County.
Thinking about it in terms of technology — during the pandemic the schools bought a million iPads. They also run a giant hospital system, the largest police and fire departments in the country, etc.
The net result is administration of a vast, sprawling (both horizontal and vertical) bureaucracy is complex, and the cogs in the wheel of that bureaucracy are simultaneously in your face and detached from reality. So you have a group of attorneys who see a threat in people posing in front of a camera.
Agree in spirit, though again if it does go viral and they become embarrassed the most likely thing is they'd shut down public access to the cameras - which would be a lousy outcome for everyone.
My county has traffic cameras available online, though it's only static images updated once a minute or so. It's not that great but I still appreciate it, especially during winter weather. Every now and then if the weather seems bad I check the cameras to see what the roads look like before I head out. It's not a big deal, but I'd be a little annoyed if they took away public access because someone was trying to make some sort of statement or game out of them.
This is an opportunity for bullshitters (in a "bullshit jobs" sense) to be seen as "doing something" and get pats on the back without significant effort - at least less effort than doing other, actually valuable things.
Tangential, but I'm a subscriber to a YouTube channel called VRF - virtual railfan - that shows essentially "traffic cams" of trains throughout North America. People do take selfies for the cam but always from a safe location.
Over the years, the cams have caught some extraordinary events: maintenance equipment starting fires, trains on fire, numerous derailments, and, I'm not kidding, probably about 100 occurrences of people driving onto the tracks and getting stuck. A disproportionate number of them occurred at Ashland, VA. Which makes me think it's a bug in the traffic design.
> A disproportionate number of them occurred at Ashland, VA. Which makes me think it's a bug in the traffic design.
Without knowledge of the crossing, it's definitely possible. Some crossing designs are better than others, and changing the design of a crossing can be very difficult depending on the site details. Changing the path of rails is always difficult due to the constraints of trains, so a poor crossing will almost certainly need to have the alignment of the road changed, but sometimes there's not enough buildable space around the crossing to build an over or undercrossing (grade separation) and it is expensive and disruptive. Sometimes it's possible to close the road if the crossing is bad and the road is deemed unnecessary, but it's pretty rare to deem roads unnecessary.
> and, I'm not kidding, probably about 100 occurrences of people driving onto the tracks and getting stuck. A disproportionate number of them occurred at Ashland, VA. Which makes me think it's a bug in the traffic design.
Can't speak for Ashland, but... educated guess, too steep elevation on the crossing, either from faulty design or bad road maintenance (the segment of road outside the compacted zone surrounding the rail settles from the load of the trucks).
In Germany, we solved that issue mostly by demanding automated radar or manual visual (direct or by camera) checks before clearing a crossing for the passing of a train at intersections that carry heavy haul traffic. However, we have on rarely-used crossings no monitoring, sometimes even no signalling, and just a day ago a freight train absolutely demolished the shit out of a rubble hauler [1].
many of the drivers simply couldn't get back on the road. If there were a ramp instead of a drop-off, the could have, however it would have been at the extreme risk of backing into traffic. Probably due to coincidence, train tracks are the perfect height to prevent drivers from turning (to drive over the rail). Some very determined drivers have done it, but probably 1/10 of the ones who become trapped.
For anyone wanting to look at traffic cameras across the US states, almost all are now available in a readily consumable GeoJSON format (with webcam URLs as properties) at [1]. There are two "Intelligent Transport Systems" software providers with 50%+ of US market share and the remainder of states generally use a custom developed website.
Not familiar with this project but I’ve taken a “selfie” with Seattle’s live traffic cameras and it didn’t involve violating any traffic laws. The video lag was such that you could wave at the camera halfway through a crosswalk, get safely to the other side, then pull out your phone and see yourself waving back.
This reminds me of an old sci-fi story, whose name I forgot, which had a world building aside that the government had 1person moviebooths stren throughout the cities where people could pay a quarter to see a 1 minute snippet of the surveillance feeds of every public place. The goal was to see yourself, or at least someone you recognized.
The cameras are old, some are black & white, and often they’re over or underexposed with all the interesting video artifacts that entails.
Unlike the webcam access at https://webcams.nyctmc.org/ the cameras update at realtime rates (30 fps) though some are slower.
Sadly, they don’t make the realtime camera cycling available to live stream that I’m aware of. I wish they would for homesick NYers. They don’t even show channel 72 in the Live TV tab of the Spectrum app (perhaps it works when using Spectrum Internet access).
Readit News
TIL NYC traffic cams have a live feed on the web
"NYC DOT traffic cameras only provide live feeds and do not record any footage. There are 919 cameras available via the NYCTMC.org website."[1]
random traffic camera https://webcams.nyctmc.org/api/cameras/a8f2d065-c266-4378-ac...
[1] https://webcams.nyctmc.org/about
They are essentially a public live traffic report so that the news agencies are not running helicopters amok to get the same footage; and many of the cameras are in tight locations where it would be hard to fly helicopters or drones without irritating neighbors or being a danger to public safety.
They get used with computer vision to control and coordinate traffic lights (sometimes with the help of inductive loops in the pavement, and sometimes without).
In this particular case: They don't record anything, and their ISM 900MHz backhauls don't have enough bandwidth for centralized video anyway.
(Sources: Background in RF, and I used to hang out with the city employee who took care of this system along with most other things relating to traffic lights there.)
Deleted Comment
This feels like it has the potential to be a "this is why we can't have nice things" outcome even though I don't think the app author is doing anything wrong.
If it's a problem as soon as the average American starts using something, it's probably better if those resources stop being made available period.
There's a pretty big difference between using it for its intended purpose (ie. monitoring traffic), and the alleged behavior that the department of transportation was opposed to.
>Office of Legal Affairs recently sent a cease-and-desist letter to Morry Kolman, the artist behind the project, charging that the TCP "encourages pedestrians to violate NYC traffic rules and engage in dangerous behavior."
Regular people have been using it for decades, though? Scrolling through the comments here are plenty of people who have discovered and put these cameras to use in their daily lives.
Something being freely provided does not inherently grant consumers the right to do with it whatever they please. The producers, being the one freely providing the things, seem well within their rights to set limits on its usage, no? Sure, sometimes things are freely produced with the express point being that they can be used without limitations, but this isn't an inherent property of the thing being freely available.
I mean, why else do we have so many different open source licensing models?
Average American probably won't be using it.
This seems to be the hole in Kant's categorical imperative[0] - plenty of useful things fail the test of universality, because there isn't one class, or two classes, but three classes of people: those who find some use for a thing, those who don't and thus don't care, and then those who have no use for the thing but don't like it anyway. And in the past century or so, thanks to the role of mass media, that third class is ruling the world.
And so...
> but the moment regular folks start getting in on the fun and they post a pic of themselves being surveilled on twitter suddenly it's time to shut everything down?
Yes, it is. It's how this has been playing out time and again - once the attention seekers, and people with overactive imagination wrt. dystopias, and maybe the few with some actually reasonable objections join forces, it's better to shut the thing down as soon as possible, to minimize the amount of time your name can be found on the front pages of major newspapers. At that point, there's little hope to talk things out and perhaps rescue the project in some form - outraged public does not do calm or rational, and if you somehow survive the first couple days and the public still cares, you're destined to become a new ball in the political pinball machine. With your name or life on the line, it's usually much easier to cut your losses than to stand on principle, especially for something that's inconsequential in the grander scheme of things.
One by one, we're losing nice things - not as much because they're abused, but mostly because there's always some performative complainers ready to make a scene. We won't be getting nice things back until our cultural immunity catches up, until we inoculate ourselves against the whining.
See also, [1] and [2].
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative
[1] - Cardinal Richelieu's "Give me six lines", though the (apparently) more accurate version from https://history.stackexchange.com/a/28484 is even better: "with two lines of a man's handwriting, an accusation could be made against the most innocent, because the business can be interpreted in such a way, that one can easily find what one wishes." More boring than malevolent, and thus that much more real; it reads like a HN comment.
[2] - Disney's Tomorrowland is, in a way, a commentary on this phenomenon; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42405210 is, in a way, a commentary on that.
I found the dude that ran it and emailed back and forth with him for a few years. They made excuses about how it is an IT issue.
An ego issue
What is interesting to me is that the public access to the cameras has been blocked a few months after the war in Ukraine started. For a few months I could watch the large convoys of equipment going towards Ukraine, and my personal theory is that so did the MoD of Russia. I haven't seen any reports about that, just my personal observation.
Or just block it i guess.
Thinking about it in terms of technology — during the pandemic the schools bought a million iPads. They also run a giant hospital system, the largest police and fire departments in the country, etc.
The net result is administration of a vast, sprawling (both horizontal and vertical) bureaucracy is complex, and the cogs in the wheel of that bureaucracy are simultaneously in your face and detached from reality. So you have a group of attorneys who see a threat in people posing in front of a camera.
My county has traffic cameras available online, though it's only static images updated once a minute or so. It's not that great but I still appreciate it, especially during winter weather. Every now and then if the weather seems bad I check the cameras to see what the roads look like before I head out. It's not a big deal, but I'd be a little annoyed if they took away public access because someone was trying to make some sort of statement or game out of them.
Deleted Comment
Having a semi automated way of doing that would be far more irritating for them.
Deleted Comment
Of course, it'll be used, but that's just a bad, bad argument at any level.
Over the years, the cams have caught some extraordinary events: maintenance equipment starting fires, trains on fire, numerous derailments, and, I'm not kidding, probably about 100 occurrences of people driving onto the tracks and getting stuck. A disproportionate number of them occurred at Ashland, VA. Which makes me think it's a bug in the traffic design.
Without knowledge of the crossing, it's definitely possible. Some crossing designs are better than others, and changing the design of a crossing can be very difficult depending on the site details. Changing the path of rails is always difficult due to the constraints of trains, so a poor crossing will almost certainly need to have the alignment of the road changed, but sometimes there's not enough buildable space around the crossing to build an over or undercrossing (grade separation) and it is expensive and disruptive. Sometimes it's possible to close the road if the crossing is bad and the road is deemed unnecessary, but it's pretty rare to deem roads unnecessary.
Can't speak for Ashland, but... educated guess, too steep elevation on the crossing, either from faulty design or bad road maintenance (the segment of road outside the compacted zone surrounding the rail settles from the load of the trucks).
In Germany, we solved that issue mostly by demanding automated radar or manual visual (direct or by camera) checks before clearing a crossing for the passing of a train at intersections that carry heavy haul traffic. However, we have on rarely-used crossings no monitoring, sometimes even no signalling, and just a day ago a freight train absolutely demolished the shit out of a rubble hauler [1].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AbruptChaos/comments/1hdjzek/a_truc...
[1] Type "transport" and "traffic" as search terms at https://www.alltheplaces.xyz/spiders
The C&D letter: https://trafficcamphotobooth.com/assets/CeaseAndDesist.pdf
So maybe NYC should just add some lag.
I tune in and leave it on in the background and it’s like having a window with an interesting view. It’s great ambient TV as noted in this article:
[2012-09-18] The Inadvertent Cinema: City Drive Live | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-inadvert...
The cameras are old, some are black & white, and often they’re over or underexposed with all the interesting video artifacts that entails.
Unlike the webcam access at https://webcams.nyctmc.org/ the cameras update at realtime rates (30 fps) though some are slower.
Sadly, they don’t make the realtime camera cycling available to live stream that I’m aware of. I wish they would for homesick NYers. They don’t even show channel 72 in the Live TV tab of the Spectrum app (perhaps it works when using Spectrum Internet access).