US traffic camera availability, month by month
Every month we check thousands of public DOT traffic cameras and record how many answer. This is the only running measurement of how US camera networks change over time.
Data measured September 1, 2026 · Roadze
These numbers overstate the problem
This measurement was taken with an earlier method that gave up on slow cameras too quickly. That turned out to bias the result badly in one direction: an agency’s “camera unavailable” card is served from cache in about 270 ms, while a real road photo takes about 740 ms to fetch. When the clock ran out it was the working cameras that fell out of the count, leaving the broken ones behind. Checking every one of Nevada’s 659 cameras one by one gave 12.9% not working, where this method reported 57.2%.
It is left up rather than deleted, because a running record that quietly drops the months it got wrong is not a record. The next measurement uses the corrected method and will replace it.
September 2026
- Cameras listed
- 51,067
- Checked
- 12,375
- Not answering
- 1,549 (12.5%)
The percentage is of the cameras we actually checked that month, not of every camera in the country. A state that was not sampled is left out rather than counted as having none down — reporting a state we did not look at as “zero broken” would be a lie by omission, and in a running record that lie stays forever.
Change since the previous month
Not comparable: both months were measured with a method we have since found to overstate faults, so the change between them would be noise, not news. The first reliable measurement replaces this.
By state, September 2026
A few states publish video only, with no still image to fetch. Those are checked by asking their video playlist instead. Three — Florida, North Carolina and Arkansas — refuse every request from outside their own site, so we cannot see whether their cameras work at all. They are left out of this table rather than shown as having nothing wrong: not being able to look is not the same as finding nothing.
| State | Cameras | Checked | Not answering | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Georgia | 4,043 | 563 | 379 | 67.3% |
| Nevada | 661 | 425 | 243 | 57.2% |
| Massachusetts | 306 | 223 | 102 | 45.7% |
| Hawaii | 361 | 290 | 106 | 36.6% |
| Idaho | 647 | 340 | 111 | 32.6% |
| Alaska | 146 | 146 | 44 | 30.1% |
| New York | 3,875 | 387 | 98 | 25.3% |
| Florida | 4,869 | 205 | 41 | 20.0% |
| Arizona | 644 | 312 | 50 | 16.0% |
| North Carolina | 1,141 | 224 | 32 | 14.3% |
| Michigan | 806 | 358 | 46 | 12.8% |
| Pennsylvania | 1,534 | 348 | 43 | 12.4% |
| North Dakota | 809 | 363 | 27 | 7.4% |
| Maine | 99 | 99 | 7 | 7.1% |
| Virginia | 1,660 | 386 | 24 | 6.2% |
| Illinois | 3,656 | 570 | 31 | 5.4% |
| Indiana | 747 | 334 | 18 | 5.4% |
| Louisiana | 336 | 299 | 14 | 4.7% |
| Washington | 2,347 | 390 | 18 | 4.6% |
| Vermont | 89 | 89 | 4 | 4.5% |
| Tennessee | 668 | 352 | 15 | 4.3% |
| Colorado | 994 | 224 | 9 | 4.0% |
| Kansas | 527 | 258 | 9 | 3.5% |
| Utah | 2,075 | 228 | 7 | 3.1% |
| Oregon | 1,148 | 206 | 6 | 2.9% |
| South Dakota | 711 | 207 | 6 | 2.9% |
| Nebraska | 349 | 278 | 7 | 2.5% |
| Wisconsin | 455 | 320 | 7 | 2.2% |
| South Carolina | 769 | 332 | 7 | 2.1% |
| New Hampshire | 198 | 197 | 4 | 2.0% |
| Ohio | 1,163 | 361 | 7 | 1.9% |
| Oklahoma | 398 | 217 | 4 | 1.8% |
| Connecticut | 347 | 287 | 5 | 1.7% |
| Alabama | 657 | 369 | 6 | 1.6% |
| Missouri | 871 | 200 | 3 | 1.5% |
| Maryland | 552 | 201 | 3 | 1.5% |
| Delaware | 362 | 201 | 2 | 1.0% |
| Montana | 422 | 312 | 2 | 0.6% |
| Kentucky | 248 | 194 | 1 | 0.5% |
| Texas | 2,284 | 211 | 1 | 0.5% |
| California | 3,535 | 398 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Minnesota | 1,525 | 194 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Mississippi | 447 | 277 | 0 | 0.0% |
Every measurement
| Month | Cameras | Checked | Not answering |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-09 | 51,067 | 12,375 | 1,549 (12.5%) |
| 2026-08 | 50,006 | 6,800 | 744 (10.9%) |
| 2026-07 | 49,659 | 6,580 | 671 (10.2%) |
Cite a specific month
How we measured
Once a month we record how many public traffic cameras each state transportation department lists, how many of them we were able to check, and how many returned no usable image. The measurement is taken the first time the site runs in a new month, so every month is measured at the same point.
A camera counts as not answering when it returns a placeholder notice instead of a road, or an image identical to another camera’s — two different cameras cannot be looking at exactly the same pixels. Agencies keep publishing these as working, which is why the number exists at all.
Where a state publishes video and no still image, we ask its video playlist instead. A missing playlist counts as down; a refused one does not. Some agencies answer every outside request with a refusal whether the camera works or not, and counting that as a fault would mark thousands of working cameras dead. When we cannot tell, we say so instead of guessing.
We never compare two months measured with different detection methods. When the detection is improved it finds faults that used to slip through, and the numbers rise without a single new camera having broken. Each measurement records which method produced it, and the comparison above refuses to run across a change.
The cameras we check are picked by a stable hash of their id, not by name. Agencies put the location inside the name — Georgia’s cameras are labelled by county — so taking the first two hundred alphabetically meant looking at five counties out of a hundred and seventeen. The same sample is followed every month, so what moves has actually moved rather than being a different draw.
Nothing is deleted. The point of this page is the series, and it cannot be reconstructed after the fact.
Free to use with credit to Roadze. See also which states have the most broken cameras right now.