Road cameras in European open data: 737 published with a location and no picture
A question for other reusers of road-authority data.
We aggregate road cameras from national and regional authorities across 16 European jurisdictions — 7,587 cameras as of today. 6,833 of them link to a current still image. Five publishers list where their cameras are but publish no image for any of them: Scotland (415), Croatia (240), Poland (35), the Netherlands (26) and North Macedonia (21) — 737 cameras that a reuser can place on a map but cannot look through.
A second, quieter gap: most feeds that do publish an image say nothing about when it was taken. Without a capture time, a reuser cannot tell a live picture from a frozen one.
Two questions:
- Has anyone asked one of these publishers for image access as open data, and what was the answer? Is it a licensing decision or a technical one?
- Is there a publisher that does include a capture timestamp with the still, which others could point to as an example?
(Disclosure: I work on NAPSPAN, a European road-data API; the per-country table is on our blog if useful — happy to link it.)