Watch live traffic cameras — and see where the Flock cameras are
There are more cameras pointed at the roads than most of us ever think about. Some are public traffic cameras you can actually look through; others are automated license-plate readers quietly logging every car that passes. SkyWatch's Traffic mode puts both on one live map of your area — the cameras you can watch, and the cameras watching you. Here's how each one works.
Live roadside traffic cameras
Traffic mode opens on a north-up map centered on your home, with nearby roadside traffic cameras marked at their real positions along the roads around you. These are the public traffic cameras — the same kind of feeds your local department of transportation uses to keep an eye on conditions.
Tap any camera and its snapshot fills the card, with the camera's name fitted underneath. When a station offers a video feed, you'll see a LIVE badge on the card. And while the card is open, the image auto-refreshes every few seconds straight from the camera, so you're looking at a near-live view of that stretch of road — handy for checking whether the highway's backed up before you commit to it.
Because your SkyWatch stays in one spot, every camera sits on the actual street it's watching. Zoom in with the − and + buttons, drag to pan around your area, and tap the middle button to snap back home. There's no search-radius limit here — pan wherever you like and the cameras in view come along.
Flock and ALPR camera locations
The second camera layer is a different story. Switch on the Flock camera overlay and SkyWatch plots the locations of automated license-plate-reader (ALPR) cameras — the Flock-style cameras that have quietly spread across a huge number of neighborhoods and intersections — right alongside the live traffic cameras.
These aren't feeds you can watch. ALPR cameras don't stream to the public; they scan and log license plates. So this layer is about awareness, not viewing. Each location pin carries whatever the data recorded about it:
- The manufacturer (Flock and other brands)
- The direction the camera faces
- How it's mounted
- The install date, where it's known
Tap a pin and you get the details that contributor noted. Switching this layer on is genuinely eye-opening — a lot of people have no idea just how many of these are positioned around the routes they drive every day.
The two layers side by side
What makes this interesting is seeing both at once. The traffic cameras show you what the roads look like right now; the Flock layer shows you where the plate-readers sit along those same roads. One you can peer through; the other is part of the surveillance backdrop of your daily drive. Having them on a single map turns an abstract idea — "there are cameras everywhere" — into something concrete and local you can actually look at.
Both layers toggle independently from the Traffic settings on your phone, so you can run just the live cameras, just the Flock map, or both together. (Traffic mode can also layer in gas prices and live road congestion on the same map — but the cameras are the heart of it.)
Who it's for
This one lands for the commuter who wants a real look at road conditions before heading out, the privacy-minded who want to know exactly where the ALPR cameras are in their area, anyone following the public conversation about Flock and license-plate surveillance who'd like to see it mapped locally, and the curious tinkerer who finds it fascinating to watch the roads — and the things watching the roads — from their desk.
Unlocking Traffic mode
Traffic is one of SkyWatch's à-la-carte modes — a one-time unlock from the SkyWatch store, with no subscription and no license key to type in. Each unit is recognized by its own device ID, so once you unlock it the mode just appears alongside the others, ready to switch to from your phone.
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