[LegitShady]

the "Transportation" name for those fixed camera systems are "Rwis" (Road Weather Information System) stations. Definitely check them out before you highway drive but also be aware that changing weather conditions can make roads slippery or otherwise dangerous.

The plow cameras and sensors (plow position, salt/aggregate activity, etc) are more useful for transportation operations staff to know what's been plowed and what still needs plowing but technically do take pictures of the whole highway instead of just the rwis stations.

[earleybird]

Worked on this one some time ago[0]. Webcams are a big reason folks come to the site. Clicking on the "Princeton" icon get you a popup of the current image and clicking on that gets you the detail page[1]. On the detail page there is a "Replay the day" button which will "card flip" the images for the last 24hrs to give you a sense of what conditions have been like (no time machine yet :-) ).

Site went live back in 2005 with the current look appearing around about 2009 (memory is getting fuzzy).

Baseline network activity on a typical day ran about 4 MByte/sec continuous; on "snow days"[2] the load increases an order of magnitude to 24 MByte/second. That was 5+ years ago - I expect there's been growth since then.

[0] https://drivebc.ca/#mapView&z=11&ll=49.485664%2C-120.367187

[1] https://images.drivebc.ca/bchighwaycam/pub/html/dbc/452.html

[2] "Snow day" might be "the Coquihalla is getting about 50cm over the next 12 hours"

[avs733]

today I learned the name of RWIS cameras.

I actually used one recently. My wife was caught in a traffic jam due to an accident/car fire. I was able to actually find a visual of her car on the highway from my laptop. She had our baby in the car who was screaming and I was able to narrate what was happening with the accident - which gave her enough time to change a diaper while stopped and then get safely back in the driver seat before traffic started moving.