Recently we have had some bad weather in the UK (OK, a fe inches of snow), and we saw a spike in downloads of our M25 traffic camera App, M25TraffiCams – more info – and then we started getting emails that camera were not available… in fact no cameras were showing up.

At first I thought they had been taken off-line because of the bad weather (traffic cameras do get taken off-line if there is a server accident, or they are broken), but the more I looked at things this clearly wasn’t the case.

What has happened is the free feed from the cameras I was using (I was using a publicly available list of camera image URLs and latitude and longitude coordinates) was no longer available, and the only source of images I could find was from feeds from the Highways Agency, which is, and I quote from their website “an Executive Agency of the Department for Transport (DfT)”, so it is part of the government.

The catch is, the Highways Agency wants money for access to the feeds. Now, I can understand this attitude if the feeds (images) used by company who was then selling them on, but I wanted access for use in a free App. the amount of money the Highways Agency wants for access is beyond my pocket, especially when you consider the App is free.

Now, in fairness to tax payers the feeds are available for free at http://www.trafficengland.com/, but there is no way the information can be used in an iPad App.

As I could no longer get an image feed from the M25 it was decided to withdraw the App.

You can still access traffic camera feeds using a number of our other free iPad Apps:

London Traffic Cams – LondonTC – Available on the App Store – more information

Sheffield Traffic Cams – SheffieldTC – Available on the App Store – more information

Welsh Traffic Cams – WalesTC – Available on the App Store – more information

We also have traffic camera feeds for:

Auckland, New Zealand – AucklandTC – Available on the App Store – more information

New York City, USA – NYCTraffiCam – Available on the App Store – more information