City councillor Emily Kerr looks at the use of hi-tech traffic counters which are about the size of a pack of cards.

Traffic can be contentious. We’ve seen this over the decades in Oxford, as more and more cars try to squeeze into our medieval streets.

A headline in the Sunday Telegraph said “Oxford City’s streets are daily choked with traffic” – and that was back in February 1986!

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I’ve spent a lot of the last 18 months looking at traffic research and information, as my ward of St. Mary’s launched low traffic neighbourhoods in May last year.

One of the frustrations I’ve had is that easy-to-understand local Oxford traffic data isn’t widely available - but that is all set to change now, with the launch of Telraams.

Telraams are traffic counters. They are about the size of a pack of cards, and they sit in a window and count the speed, direction, and type of traffic. All types of traffic: bikes, cars, lorries, pedestrians. It’s all uploaded to a website where anyone can access it in a very user-friendly format. Just search for Telraam on your browser and click on maps. You will see that there are currently at least 20 counters in Oxford and another 4 elsewhere in Oxfordshire.

The devices are cameras which use AI to categorise, and they don’t store any images so there’s no privacy issues. The best thing about them is they cost less than £200, making them affordable for small organisations like residents’ associations, parish councils and even local councillors.

Oxford Mail: There are a number of practical applications. We now have a fairly extensive network in East Oxford, and more Telraams are springing up across the city.

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In my ward, we can see how many cyclists and pedestrians are using the LTNs. We’ve got 2,000 to 3,000 per day within the segment between Cowley Road and Iffley Road, and a significant volume of this is the school run – which you can see from the time of day people are travelling.

Residents of Jeune Street have been able to tell how many cars are illegally driving down it the wrong way. We’ve noticed that there’s very heavy pedestrian use of Bullingdon Road, which means we’ll request for it to be salted and gritted first during the winter.

Headley Way sees significant speeding and residents there can request enforcement with more accurate details of the scale of the issue. When School Streets come in, we’ll be able to see how they affect traffic.

Oxfordshire County Council Cabinet is deciding this coming Tuesday whether to make the East Oxford low traffic neighbourhoods permanent, and whether to replace the bollards in Magdalen Road, James Street and Divinity Road with automatic number plate recognition cameras.

Oxford Mail: So, in addition, Telraam counters will make it possible to monitor the effects of those changes on every road affected in the Cowley and East Oxford low traffic neighbourhoods.

Telraams aren’t perfect, they are less accurate than the costly traffic counters deployed by local councils. From my experience, they particularly struggle with large groups of pedestrians (such as teenagers walking to school) and they also can’t count in the darkness.

It’s also a shame for us that we didn’t have Telraams in place before the East Oxford LTNs as it means we can’t measure the changes on individual roads and have to rely on the published data.

But the fact that Telraams provide cheap, live data available free to all local citizens more than makes up for their deficiencies.

I’d highly recommend them to residents’ associations and individuals across the County.

And anyone can access their interactive map by googling “Telraam”.

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About the author 

Andy is the Trade and Tourism reporter for the Oxford Mail and you can sign up to his newsletters for free here. 

He joined the team more than 20 years ago and he covers community news across Oxfordshire.

His Trade and Tourism newsletter is released every Saturday morning. 

You can also read his weekly Traffic and Transport newsletter.