LiveTrafficCam public API

The livetrafficcam.com public API serves live US traffic camera data as JSON. No authentication, no key. Camera liveness is measured with real HTTP checks, so live_status reflects whether a feed actually serves a current image.

GET /api/cams.json

Cameras for one state or one named entity. Exactly one of the two parameters:

• ?state=WA - two-letter state code.
• ?entity=donner-pass - slug of a pass, corridor, bridge or tunnel.

curl "https://livetrafficcam.com/api/cams.json?state=WA"

Response: {"cams": [...]}, each camera with id, name, slug, lat, lng, route, state, live_status (live, stale or dead), last_live_at, official_url (the operating agency's page), and attribution (for example "Camera: WSDOT").

Row cap: at most 200 cameras per query. For full per-state fleet counts use the uptime endpoint below.

GET /reports/camera-uptime.json

Measured per-state uptime of official DOT cameras: cameras tracked, live/stale/dead right now, and the 14-day check success rate.

curl "https://livetrafficcam.com/reports/camera-uptime.json"

Human-readable twin: the camera uptime report, which is also the citation URL for these numbers.

GET /reports/traffic-camera-statistics.json

How many official DOT traffic cameras exist, per state and per agency. Page twin: traffic camera statistics.

Conventions

• Responses are cached at the edge for 60 seconds; polling faster returns the same data.
• Field changes are additive only; existing fields do not get renamed or repurposed.
• Keep the per-camera attribution line when displaying the data.
• No CORS headers today, so call it server-side.
• Please send a descriptive User-Agent.

Clients

• livetrafficcam-mcp - MCP server over this API for AI assistants.
• traffic-camera-sources - weekly GeoJSON and uptime snapshots of this API's data.