Traffic Monitoring Camera, M8 - Whitburn West
Introduction
The photograph on this page of Traffic Monitoring Camera, M8 - Whitburn West by Ian Dodds as part of the Geograph project.
The Geograph project started in 2005 with the aim of publishing, organising and preserving representative images for every square kilometre of Great Britain, Ireland and the Isle of Man.
There are currently over 7.5m images from over 14,400 individuals and you can help contribute to the project by visiting https://www.geograph.org.uk
Traffic Monitoring Camera, M8 - Whitburn West
Image: © Ian Dodds Taken: 2 May 2021
If you go to the Traffic Scotland website you can view the M8 motorway at 34 locations - this averages out at about one every two miles. This one is named Whitburn West and the images update every five minutes or so, though there's not much to see when it's dark as this section has no streetlights. I'd rather hoped some night-time technology was utilised so you could see more than the occasional vehicle light, but presumably in winter rush-hour there are so many lights it is obvious the traffic is slow. I also wondered why they don't just put all the cameras on bridges to save money but there are a number of possible reasons I suppose - ease of maintenance, better vantage points, and ease of laying cables. Online searches, unsurprisingly, just come up with umpteen sites advising motorists on how to spot speed cameras though!
Images are licensed for reuse under creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0
Image Location
Latitude
55.87068
Longitude
-3.690442