How many US traffic cameras are actually broken
Of the 6,579 cameras we checked, 645 were serving a placeholder instead of a road — about 10%. And 0 of those were still being published as working.
Data measured July 28, 2026 · Roadze
When a public traffic camera breaks, the state's website rarely says so. The camera stays in the list, the map still shows a dot, and what you actually get is a black image reading "STREAM NOT AVAILABLE" — or the local equivalent.
The gap between what is published and what works is not small. In Massachusetts, 107 of the 200 cameras we checked were dead — 54% of the sample.
Broken cameras by state
| State | Checked | Broken | % broken |
|---|---|---|---|
| Massachusetts | 200 | 107 | 54% |
| Georgia | 198 | 93 | 47% |
| Idaho | 200 | 79 | 40% |
| Alaska | 144 | 43 | 30% |
| Nevada | 200 | 40 | 20% |
| Hawaii | 200 | 39 | 20% |
| New York | 200 | 31 | 16% |
| Arizona | 200 | 29 | 15% |
| Michigan | 200 | 29 | 15% |
| Virginia | 135 | 16 | 12% |
| Wisconsin | 200 | 22 | 11% |
| Pennsylvania | 149 | 13 | 9% |
| Washington | 199 | 17 | 9% |
| Tennessee | 197 | 12 | 6% |
| Louisiana | 200 | 9 | 5% |
| Maine | 98 | 4 | 4% |
| Ohio | 200 | 7 | 4% |
| South Carolina | 200 | 7 | 4% |
| Kansas | 199 | 6 | 3% |
| Nebraska | 199 | 6 | 3% |
| Utah | 200 | 5 | 3% |
| Vermont | 89 | 2 | 2% |
| Kentucky | 193 | 4 | 2% |
| Illinois | 195 | 4 | 2% |
| New Hampshire | 195 | 4 | 2% |
| North Dakota | 200 | 4 | 2% |
| Alabama | 200 | 3 | 2% |
| Colorado | 200 | 3 | 2% |
| Indiana | 190 | 2 | 1% |
| Iowa | 195 | 2 | 1% |
| Minnesota | 196 | 2 | 1% |
| Connecticut | 200 | 1 | 1% |
| California | 198 | 0 | 0% |
| Mississippi | 200 | 0 | 0% |
| Montana | 200 | 0 | 0% |
How we measured
We fetch the published image of each camera and compare it with the others. A placeholder is the same file for many cameras at once — two different cameras cannot be looking at exactly the same pixels — so a repeated image hash means a notice board, not a road. Cameras that keep serving an identical image for over 30 minutes across several checks are counted as dead too.
Percentages are over the cameras we actually checked in each state, not over its whole network — we sample up to 200 per state. Cameras that did not answer at all are excluded rather than counted as broken: a timeout is not proof of failure, and counting it as one would inflate every number on this page.
The check runs again every day, so a camera that comes back is un-flagged automatically. These figures move.
What this means if you just want to see the road
On Roadze the cameras we know are broken are pushed to the bottom, so the ones you see first are the ones that actually show something.