Detroit Traffic Cameras: What Are They Used For?

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When you are stuck in a traffic jam, do you ever wish you could have known ahead of time what the roads looked like before hopping into your car? The Michigan Department of Transportation offers many online resources, and one of them is an online tool that lets you see where in Michigan, including Detroit, there are traffic cameras set up monitoring the road traffic and conditions. You can then pick a specific listed camera location and see traffic movement and conditions in real time.

How Can Traffic Camera Video Feeds Help Me?

If you travel a specific route to work or your family takes several specific common roadways, you can select those as "favorites" so that you can easily view them whenever you like. This can be very useful to plan ahead. If you see that there is a terrible traffic jam that looks like you will be in for a bumper-to-bumper drive in the best of cases, you can take an alternate route. This is obviously a timesaver, but it is also good for safety too. Traffic happens for many reasons, including riskier ones like poor road conditions and imminent threats on the road, including major car accidents. If you take yourself away from the proximity of these sorts of risks, you're lower the probability that you can be more directly and adversely affected by them.

The Michigan Department of Transportation also offers a way to see the distribution of traffic cameras in an overhead view of the state. Using this tool, you can see where they are the most common, and you can see which cameras also measure weather conditions and visibility. If you hover over any given icon, you can view the live camera feed. If it is a camera zone that also measures weather data, then the popup box will not only show you the live camera feed, you can also see weather statistics including air temperature, humidity, average wind, one hour precipitation, dew point, and visibility.

Can Traffic Camera Footage Be Used as Court Evidence?

There are several kinds of traffic detection devices, and traffic cameras of the type described above are distinct from the type that takes a picture of your license plate and results in a mailed ticket for running a red light. Traffic cameras are put in place to measure broader scale traffic patterns and road conditions rather than catching individuals in the act of breaking traffic laws. But could this footage ever be used as evidence? The answer probably depends on what you are looking for, and whether the footage is high resolution enough to offer any reliable information helpful to any given question. If you see the traffic camera footage on the Michigan Department of Transportation's website, you'll see that the resolution is quite grainy. It would be unlikely to get distinct details needed to irrefutably identify a specific car and its license plate, much less a person. It could be helpful in answering more basic questions like whether a red truck turned left or right at any given time. This type of footage may not be used for evidence as much as one might suspect, but if you have a legitimate question about it being of possible use in your case, you should contact an experienced attorney who can facilitate possible access to it.

Sachs Waldman has nearly four decades of experience advocating for clients in and outside of Detroit. Our dedicated litigators will fight for you every step of the way. Contact us today for a free, confidential consultation at (313) 965-3464 or fill out our online form.