Real-time traffic cameras in Taiwan

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Taiwan is not a big place. It’s crowded, difficult to navigate, and can induce a headache in seconds flat.

Yet sometimes certain gems emerge to show how technology makes life a little easier on the island.
 
The other day I was fiddling around on Google Maps and came across this:

Taiwan Freeway Realtime Cameras

Click a checkbox to show the cameras installed beside Taiwan’s 7 different national highways.

Once the highway shows up on Google Maps, click on a bubble to see live streaming video from the traffic cameras.

I was very impressed with the streaming quality of the cameras, as well as the sheer number of them deployed around Taipei City.

For a quick comparison, I typed “realtime traffic cameras” in Google and found the New York City Department of Transportation which came up first in the search.

A lot of traffic cameras are also scattered around New York City.

The streaming quality is jittery, but it does the job.

After checking out New York, I headed out to California to see what they have on offer.

Numerous cameras spread along the coast in Northern California.

California doesn’t support streaming, but they post the last 8 images from the camera for visitors to check out.

4 of the last 8 images from Humbolt County

So after "cruising" the highways of New York and California, I came back to Taiwan.


National highway 1 and 3 run along the west coast of the island.

The above pic is from highway 1 outside of Hsin Chu. Hsin Chu is often called the Silicon Valley of Taiwan due to the large concentration of technology companies there.
 

This is a shot of the sun shining in Taichung--Taiwan’s 3rd largest city with arguably the best weather on the island. (Taipei has a lot more rain and Kaohsuing is unbearably hot year round.) 

While the traffic cameras in southern Taiwan don’t seem to be enabled, it is still pretty cool to check out different parts of the island from my browser. It's an impressive feat of technology and a good way to see how a surveillance network is deployed and streamed over the Internet.

If you’d like to view more real-time traffic cameras in Taiwan, you can check them out here on Google Maps.