What you're looking at
The heat is harm, not traffic — only crashes that killed or seriously injured someone. The red dots are the fatal ones. The amber and green dots are the 348 fixed and red-light speed cameras NSW publishes locations for. Two things jump out once you press play:
- The cameras hug the city. Fixed and red-light cameras line up on Sydney's arterials and a handful of regional main streets — exactly where traffic (and revenue) is thickest.
- The dying happens on the open road. Flip on Highways only and the picture inverts: fatalities scatter down the Hume, the Newell, the Pacific and the back-country roads — where there are almost no cameras at all. Two-thirds of the state's road deaths are on country roads; the enforcement isn't.
An honest limit NSW does not publish the install date of each camera, so the camera layer can't animate — it shows current locations. (No government camera dataset in Australia carries per-site install dates; we checked.) Mobile, average-speed and phone-detection cameras aren't in the open location data either, so they're not shown. Queensland publishes crash coordinates back to 2001 but no camera coordinates at all — so the QLD view is fatal crashes only, no camera layer. The crash data is complete and real, and it's what animates.
The camera timeline it won't show
Since per-camera dates are secret, here's the rollout at the program level — the years the net widened, from the sourced pages across this site.
| Year | What was switched on |
|---|---|
| 2010 | Average-speed (point-to-point) cameras — "trucks only," on freight-safety grounds |
| 2019 | World-first mobile-phone detection cameras begin (fines from Mar 2020) |
| 2020 | Warning signs stripped from mobile speed cameras — low-range fines jump ~9× |
| 2023 | Warning signs restored — fines fall ~90% |
| 2024 | Seatbelt detection added — 11,400 fines in 21 days, no grace period |
| 2025 | Average-speed enforcement extended to ordinary cars — the "trucks only" promise gone |
See Goldmines (the urban-camera / rural-death mismatch), Cabin Cameras and Surveillance. Program dates are cited on those pages.
Check the data yourself
- Cameras — NSW Speed Cameras (fixed + red-light location CSVs, Transport for NSW, CC-BY).
- Crashes (NSW) — NSW Road Crash Data 2020–2024 (Transport for NSW, CC-BY 3.0 AU) — 92,189 crashes; we mapped the 20,980 that killed or seriously injured someone.
- Crashes (QLD) — Road crash locations, Queensland (Queensland Government, CC-BY 4.0) — 2001–2025; we mapped the 6,391 fatal crashes.
- Basemap — OpenFreeMap · © OpenStreetMap contributors.
Coordinates are as published by the agencies; crash points are placed to the nearest ~10m. This is public-record data presented faithfully — verify against the source before relying on any single point.