Bilbo Data
How busy is that corner, really? Ask the city's own cameras.
New York runs more than nine hundred public traffic cameras, and each one posts a small grainy still every few seconds for anyone to see. Bilbo Data reads them. A compact vision model counts the cars, trucks, buses and people in each frame, and then the frame is thrown away. About twenty bytes of counts survive from every twenty kilobytes of image.
The plumbing is deliberately cheap. A worker on GitHub Actions keeps re-triggering itself, writes one reading per camera per minute and commits it straight to the repository, so git is the database. Each night the day's readings are packed into Parquet files seventeen times smaller than the originals, and the public site is static and reads those files directly.
Some answers came quickly. At 352 by 240 pixels you can count reliably, tell a bus from a van and estimate size and speed, but colour is a lost cause. The busiest corner on record is Atlantic Avenue at Pennsylvania Avenue. The project began as pedcount, thirty cameras around Crown Heights, before it went citywide.