I reached the end of poking traffic cams. I ended up with a system that:

1. Polled all the cameras every 10m.
2. Ran each camera through a image recognition model, counts the number of cars in the image.
3. exports the count to Prometheus.

This blog is a very similar counting system.

How well does it work?

Here’s some traffic I got stuck in.

You can see that the bulk of the traffic is to the top middle of the picture, and isn’t counted.

Here’s another problem: traffic is all on one side of the road.

Also, the weather.

However, sometimes the results are artistic.

And a graph