How Many Traffic Cameras Are There in the US? (2026 Count by State)

Every state transportation department runs traffic cameras: the pole-mounted cameras its operators use to spot crashes, stalled cars, flooding and snow, and that anyone can watch on the state's 511 traffic site. No agency publishes a national total: the federal survey that used to ask stopped in 2016, and the counts states publish about themselves are often years old. So RoadSigns.com counted them. On October 8 and 9, 2026, we downloaded the camera list behind every state's official traffic map and counted each camera. The answer: more than 45,000 traffic cameras watch U.S. roads, and 41 percent of them are in just five states.

Source note: every number in this article comes from a government source, mostly the state's own traffic map. Where we could not read a state's map, we say what we used instead and how old it is. The method is at the end.

How Many Traffic Cameras Does Each State Have?

The table lists every state, with the official map where you can watch its cameras under the state name, and what we counted there. A camera location is one camera on the map. Camera views counts the separate pictures, since one pole can carry cameras pointing in several directions. Live video is the share of locations that stream video rather than still photos. The last column divides cameras by miles of public road, so big and small states can be compared.

Blank cells mean the data does not say. Small notes under a number mark the states where we could not read the live map and used the state's own published list or figure instead.

<blockquote style="margin:1.5em 0;padding:1em 1.25em;border-left:4px solid currentColor">
<p style="margin:0 0 .5em"><strong>Traffic Cameras by State, October 2026</strong></p>
<p style="margin:0 0 .5em">Chart and sources: <a href="https://roadsigns.com/blogs/resources/how-many-traffic-cameras-are-in-the-us#traffic-cameras-by-state" rel="noopener" target="_blank">roadsigns.com</a></p>
<p style="margin:0;font-size:.9em;opacity:.8">Source: official state DOT traffic camera lists, counted by RoadSigns.com, October 2026.</p>
</blockquote>

Which States Have the Most Cameras per Mile of Road?

Big states have more road to watch. Dividing each state's cameras by its miles of public road shows how closely the roads are actually covered. Nationally the count works out to about 12 cameras for every 1,000 miles of public road. Small, crowded places lead: Hawaii's cameras are almost all on Oahu, and Delaware covers its short highway network densely. Florida and Georgia rank high on both lists. Rural states sit at the bottom: Montana (1.6), South Dakota (2.1), North Dakota (2.1), New Mexico (2.6) and Kansas (3.0) cameras per 1,000 miles.

<blockquote style="margin:1.5em 0;padding:1em 1.25em;border-left:4px solid currentColor">
<p style="margin:0 0 .5em"><strong>Traffic Cameras per 1,000 Miles of Road by State, October 2026</strong></p>
<p style="margin:0 0 .5em">Chart and sources: <a href="https://roadsigns.com/blogs/resources/how-many-traffic-cameras-are-in-the-us#traffic-cameras-per-mile" rel="noopener" target="_blank">roadsigns.com</a></p>
<p style="margin:0;font-size:.9em;opacity:.8">Sources: state DOT camera lists, October 2026; FHWA Highway Statistics 2024, Table HM-20. Analysis by RoadSigns.com.</p>
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Cameras Spread Fast, Then the Government Stopped Counting

The U.S. Department of Transportation used to track traffic cameras through its ITS Deployment Tracking Survey of freeway agencies in the largest metro areas. In 2000, cameras covered 15 percent of those freeway miles. By 2016 they covered 68 percent. The same agencies reported 7,067 freeway cameras in 2006, 10,187 in 2010 and 15,079 in 2016. Then the question was dropped: the 2020 and 2023 surveys no longer ask how many cameras an agency runs, so there has been no federal camera count for a decade.

<blockquote style="margin:1.5em 0;padding:1em 1.25em;border-left:4px solid currentColor">
<p style="margin:0 0 .5em"><strong>Share of Big-City Freeway Miles Watched by Traffic Cameras, 2000 to 2016</strong></p>
<p style="margin:0 0 .5em">Chart and sources: <a href="https://roadsigns.com/blogs/resources/how-many-traffic-cameras-are-in-the-us#freeway-camera-coverage" rel="noopener" target="_blank">roadsigns.com</a></p>
<p style="margin:0;font-size:.9em;opacity:.8">Source: USDOT ITS Deployment Tracking Survey reports, 2010, 2013 and 2016.</p>
</blockquote>

States Undercount Their Own Cameras

When a state does publish a camera count, it is usually out of date. Georgia's 511 site still says it offers "3,700+" cameras; its map now has 4,331. Minnesota said it had about 1,100 in 2019; its map now has 1,524. Hawaii said 200 on Oahu in 2019; GoAkamai now shows 309 on Oahu. The chart compares every state figure we could check against the agency's own page with what its map shows today.

<blockquote style="margin:1.5em 0;padding:1em 1.25em;border-left:4px solid currentColor">
<p style="margin:0 0 .5em"><strong>State Traffic Camera Counts: Published vs. Counted, October 2026</strong></p>
<p style="margin:0 0 .5em">Chart and sources: <a href="https://roadsigns.com/blogs/resources/how-many-traffic-cameras-are-in-the-us#state-camera-claims" rel="noopener" target="_blank">roadsigns.com</a></p>
<p style="margin:0;font-size:.9em;opacity:.8">Sources: state DOT publications; state DOT camera lists counted by RoadSigns.com, October 2026.</p>
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Who Runs the Cameras on a State's Map?

A state's traffic map is not only state cameras. Many states pull in feeds from counties, cities and toll roads, and in some places those partners supply most of the cameras:

• Georgia: only about 1,300 of its 4,331 camera names start with GDOT. The rest carry county and city codes, led by Gwinnett (495), Cobb (365) and Atlanta (275).
• Illinois: county cameras outnumber state ones. Lake County alone supplies 472 of the 1,174 cameras on the state map, and DuPage and Kane counties another 273.
• New York: 969 of the 2,711 cameras on 511NY belong to New York City DOT. They post still images; the state's own cameras stream video.
• Florida: 904 cameras, 18 percent of the total, come from the Central Florida and Miami-Dade expressway authorities, the City of Tallahassee and Broward County.
• Oregon: about a third of TripCheck's 1,112 cameras are county and city cameras, mostly in the Portland area.
• Idaho: more than half of its 415 cameras (215) belong to the Ada County Highway District around Boise.

In rural states the picture is different again. Nearly every camera in North Dakota (188 of 189), Montana (117 of 122) and Wyoming (207 of 228) sits on a road weather station and photographs the pavement every few minutes, so drivers can see snow and ice before they set out.

Cameras that a city or regional center runs but does not share with the state map are not in this count. Los Angeles DOT says its signal system has 620 traffic monitoring cameras, none of them on Caltrans's list. Houston TranStar's own camera list has 1,386 entries, about 550 more than the TxDOT Houston cameras on DriveTexas, mostly toll road, county and city cameras. That is one more reason the national total is a floor, not a ceiling.

Caveats

• We counted what each state publishes on its traffic map. A camera that is installed but not shared with the public is not counted, and a camera that is offline but still listed is counted.
• Six states could not be read live, so we used the state's own published list instead: California (Caltrans list, October 2024), Maryland (state GIS copy of CHART), Michigan (MDOT list last updated in 2021, likely low), Missouri (state copy from July 2025), Utah (UDOT equipment list, May 2025) and Wisconsin (state GIS copy of the 511 list).
• Tennessee's 661 is TDOT's own figure and Oklahoma's 500 is ODOT's "more than 500" from 2024. We could not count either map.
• Alabama, Arkansas, New Jersey and Rhode Island are not counted. New Jersey last published a figure in 2011 (430 cameras); the others publish none we could find. Their cameras would add to the total, which is why we say more than 45,000.
• Cameras near state lines are assigned by their map coordinates, and cameras a neighboring state shows on its map (for example Kansas City cameras on both the Kansas and Missouri maps) are counted once, in the state where they stand.
• Road weather cameras are counted when they are on the state's camera map. They make up most of the cameras in the northern Plains and Mountain states.

Methodology

Compiled by RoadSigns.com on October 9, 2026. For each state we found the official traveler information map run by the state DOT or its 511 program, located the camera list that map loads (usually a public JSON, GeoJSON or ArcGIS file), downloaded it on October 8 or 9, 2026, and counted unique camera IDs. That is the "camera locations" number. Where the list gives several images per camera, we also counted them as "camera views," and where it marks which cameras stream video, we counted those. We placed every camera inside a state using U.S. Census Bureau state boundaries, dropped the ones that fall in a neighboring state or Canada, and removed exact duplicates. Washington, D.C. has no public camera map, so its figure is DDOT's published list of traffic cameras. Where a state's map could not be read, we used the newest list or figure the state itself publishes and marked it in the table. Road miles are from FHWA Highway Statistics 2024, Table HM-20. The national total adds the 43,835 cameras we counted and the 1,161 reported by Tennessee and Oklahoma. The per-state files behind every number are available on request.

Sources

• State DOT traffic camera maps and the camera lists they load, linked by state in the table above, downloaded October 8 and 9, 2026.
• FHWA Highway Statistics 2024, Table HM-20 (public road miles by state).
• U.S. Census Bureau TIGERweb (state boundaries used to place cameras).
• TDOT, Integrated ITS SmartWay Systems (661 CCTV cameras).
• ODOT, March 2024 commission meeting release (more than 500 cameras on OKTraffic).
• NJDOT, 2011 press release (430 traffic cameras).
• State published camera counts are linked under the third chart.