Scaling community-powered traffic monitoring across Oxfordshire

Oxfordshire County Council is not short of traffic data on its busiest roads. Through its innovation service, Innovate Oxfordshire, it already runs a network of around 100 high-specification sensors covering Oxford's main roads, its traffic filters and the upcoming congestion charge. What it lacked was affordable coverage of everything else: the quieter residential streets, school routes, rural lanes and greenways where high-grade kit is either too expensive to justify or impossible to install. 

Telraam fills that gap. From an initial pilot in 2023, the council has grown to more than 50 Telraam sensors, with plans to reach up to 100 by the end of summer 2026, and over half are hosted by residents and local groups. It is one of the clearest examples in the UK of a large highway authority adopting low-cost, citizen-powered sensors as serious infrastructure.

The Challenge

Like most highway authorities, Oxfordshire had good monitoring where it can afford to put premium equipment, usually on main roads, and very little everywhere else. High-specification camera sensors are well suited to busy junctions and main roads, but they are not cost-effective for residential streets carrying a couple of thousand vehicles a day, and they cannot be installed where there is no power, no lighting and no five-metre mounting point. That leaves a large evidence gap on exactly the streets where active travel decisions are made.

That gap matters in Oxfordshire. The council's Local Transport and Connectivity Plan (LTCP) sets ambitious targets for increased walking and cycling and reduced car trips. Many of those targets are hard to monitor. The council needed a way to collect granular, multimodal data quickly and cheaply across the whole network, not just on the main corridors.

Getting started: low cost, low friction

Telraam suited the brief because the barrier to entry is low. The sensors are small, inexpensive and simple enough to be installed by residents as well as council teams. Mounted inside an upper-floor window, each unit uses a low-resolution camera and on-device (edge) processing to classify pedestrians, cyclists, cars and heavier vehicles, and to measure vehicle speeds. No images or personal data are recorded; only aggregated counts and speed metrics are sent to an online dashboard, which removes the privacy and cost objections that usually accompany camera-based monitoring.

Speed of deployment proved to be one of the biggest practical advantages. Commissioning a high-grade sensor can mean a lead time of around four months before reliable data arrives. With Telraam, the council keeps stock on hand: where there is a suitable window, a sensor can be installed and returning data the next day. 

Maintenance is simpler too. Outdoor high-specification units mounted at height need specialist access to maintain, while Telraams can be accessed by the building occupant for maintenance.

Why it works for councils:

• Affordable: Each sensor costs a fraction of conventional monitoring equipment, so coverage is no longer rationed to a few priority sites.
• Fast to deploy: Window-mounted installation means data within a day, versus months of lead time for high-grade kit — and no civils works or road closures.
• Privacy by design: No images or personal data are captured — only aggregated counts and speeds.
• Transparent: Data is publicly accessible, which builds trust and invites scrutiny rather than deflecting it.

Building the network

The rollout was deliberately phased. The first batch went into council-controlled buildings such as district offices and fire stations, where access and longevity were assured and officers could prove the technology. From there, the council expanded using transport planners' priorities to identify target areas, then door-knocked likely windows to recruit hosts. The delivery model combined three strands:

• Community engagement: Door-knocking and letter drops to recruit residents with suitable windows.
• Local assets: Working with town councils, schools and fire stations to place sensors in high-value, long-term strategic locations such as town centres and school zones.
• Citizen science: Encouraging residents and community groups to host and even buy their own sensors, supported by guidance from the project team.

Residents motivated by issue such as speeding on their own street are often enthusiastic, because they understand that persistent data is what it takes to demonstrate a problem to decision-makers.

In March 2026, the council put out a newsletter call for residents to host one of 40 new sensors, now coming online. Rather than targeting specific schemes, this wave builds a county-wide picture of how quieter roads and lanes are used, including a number of school streets.

In April 2026, the council added six solar-powered outdoor sensors alongside five indoor units to monitor the greenways and outer cordon in and out of Oxford. These rural routes have no mains power; places where a high-grade sensor could not be installed at any price. A solar-powered Telraam on a low-cost column does the job, enabling persistent, year-round monitoring quickly and cheaply.

What the data shows

The deployment demonstrates several benefits of running Telraam at scale:

• Proven at scale: 50+ active sensors across urban, suburban and rural areas show the model works for a large authority, not just a single village or street.
• Better evidence, lower cost: The network supports before-and-after evaluation of active travel schemes and is building the sensor-based baseline the council previously lacked for its modal-shift targets.
• Operational value: Schools, town councils and council teams can access the public dashboard directly to spot speeding, understand peak-time conditions and inform local decisions.
• Community-backed growth: Community-owned sensors extend coverage and build local buy-in, so the network expands through partnership rather than council investment alone.

One illustrative example: at a single residential street in east Oxford, sensor data showed a 16% rise in pedestrians after a Low Traffic Neighbourhood was introduced. It is one street rather than a network-wide finding, but it shows the kind of localised, scheme-level evidence that is hard and expensive to capture any other way.

Building institutional credibility

A common reason councils hesitate over lower-cost sensors is accuracy. Oxfordshire's response has been to treat that head-on rather than overclaim. The council is developing a methodology to present Telraam data alongside its other sources, including its high-specification sensors and automatic traffic counters, so that each feed is used appropriately and its relative accuracy is understood. The aim is to establish Telraam as a serious, defensible data source for a highway authority.

Why it matters for other councils

Oxfordshire is a large, upper-tier authority that already invests in premium monitoring and still chose Telraam alongside temporary surveys to cover other parts of its network. Telraam devices support the monitoring council's LTCP and Active Travel Strategy, supporting goals on reducing car dependency, improving safety and cutting emissions.

The model is also replicable. Low unit cost, simple installation and shared ownership mean another authority could start small, prove the value, and scale at a pace its budget allows, exactly as Oxfordshire did.

What our client says

“We already run a large network of high-specification sensors, but they aren't cost-effective on quieter residential roads, and that is exactly where Telraam comes in. A high-grade sensor on a junction can mean a three to four-month lead time, whereas with Telraam, if you have a good window, we can have data coming in the next day — and it becomes a serious tool for a highway authority.

“On the greenways into Oxford, we needed to monitor rural routes with no power and no appropriate infrastructure, places where the installation of a high grade would be problematic and costly, if possible at all. A solar-powered Telraam on a low-cost column does the job. That mix of indoor units in residents' homes and solar units outdoors lets us build a county-wide picture quickly and cheaply."

— Graham Stanley, Monitoring & Evaluation and Insourcing Team Leader, Oxfordshire County Council

Next steps

Oxfordshire plans to integrate Telraam data into its planning and analysis tools alongside other data sources, so the transport system can be understood as a whole rather than as isolated road segments. The network is set to grow towards 100 sensors through the rest of 2026, continuing the mix of council and community ownership that has defined the project so far.