How close is the nearest plate camera? Typical distances, place by place

0.4 miles (630 m). That is the middle value across the 329 places with a locator page, in the data dated October 2, 2026. Rank those places by how far a typical point inside each one is from the nearest mapped license plate camera, and 169 of them come in at that distance or less.

The middle half of the ranking runs from 0.3 miles (480 m) to 0.5 miles (730 m). The shortest typical distance is 450 feet (130 m), in Youngtown, AZ; the longest is 3.4 miles (5,490 m), in New Orleans, LA.

Among the 329 places, the typical distance is a quarter mile or less in 41, half a mile or less in 275, and more than a mile in 14.

Two limits apply throughout: only mapped cameras are counted, and only places that qualified for a page are ranked, by a rule that lets the shortest typical distances in first when room runs out. See what these numbers do not say.

Take one place. We cover the area inside its boundary with a regular grid of points and measure, from each point, the straight-line distance to the nearest mapped camera. The typical distance is the median of those measurements: as many points lie closer to a camera than that as lie farther away. The camera can be of any maker and can stand outside the boundary, so a pin just over the city line counts when it is the nearest.

Each camera is one node in OpenStreetMap, placed at the camera’s location and given the tag surveillance:type=ALPR.^⁠[1] Volunteers build that map.^⁠[2] We read the nodes with the Overpass API, a read-only service for querying the map.^⁠[3] A place is an incorporated community (usually a city, town, village or borough) or a census-designated place, a named settlement that is not legally incorporated.^⁠[4] Its boundary is the one in the cartographic boundary files that the U.S. Census Bureau publishes;^⁠[5] the methods page names the edition and scale.

Grid points sit about 330 feet (100 m) apart in 262 places and about 660 feet (200 m) apart in 67 places: 2,166,411 points in all. Of the 40,051 cameras mapped inside the 329 places, Flock Safety is the recorded maker of 29,838.

The data rounds each distance to about the nearest 33 feet (10 m), so places can tie; the larger half-mile share then ranks as closer, and after that the larger camera count.

Land area splits the two groups: no place among the closest 10 covers more than 5.7 square miles, and none among the farthest 10 covers less than 76.9 square miles.

Water inside an outline counts as area too. The grid for New Orleans, LA covers 349 square miles; its land area is 169.6.

Your own town may not be listed. Search near an address to see the closest mapped cameras to one spot.

The half-mile share is the percentage of a place’s area that lies within half a mile of a mapped camera, counted on the same grid. The exact radius is 800 m, about 15 feet short of a half mile.

What the share adds is a fixed yardstick. The typical distance marks the middle of a place’s own list of distances; the share counts how much of that list falls inside one radius, the same everywhere. Santa Maria, CA and Alpharetta, GA have the same typical distance, 0.3 miles (440 m), yet 67% of the first lies within half a mile of a mapped camera, against 89% of the second.

Across the 329 places the share runs from 10%, in 2 places, to 100%, in 11 places. The median is 65%, and the middle half fall between 56% and 79%. Shares are whole percentages, so 100% means 99.5% or more.

Spacing describes how the pins are arranged, not how near they are to the rest of a place. For each mapped camera in a place, we take the distance to the nearest other camera mapped in that place; the place’s spacing is the median of those gaps.

Across the 329 places, the middle value for spacing is 350 feet (110 m). In all 329, spacing is shorter than the typical distance.

The two measures come apart where cameras cluster. Of the 40,051 cameras mapped in these places, 15,991 (40%) have another camera mapped in the same place within 200 feet (60 m). Pins that close together pull spacing down while doing little to bring a camera nearer to the rest of the place. In New Orleans, LA, where the typical distance exceeds spacing by the most, cameras are a median of 450 feet (130 m) from the next one, while a typical point is 3.4 miles (5,490 m) from the nearest.

Nationwide, the median gap from one mapped camera to the nearest other in its state is 450 feet (140 m), across 143,491 cameras.

• They cover mapped cameras only. A camera nobody has added to OpenStreetMap is missing from every figure, so each count is a floor, and a thoroughly mapped area looks denser than a thinly mapped one. The error runs both ways: an unmapped camera can only make the true distance shorter than the figure, and a pin for a camera that has come down can only make it longer. To add a camera you have seen yourself, follow the guide to reporting a camera.
• The places are not a sample of the country. A place gets a page by rule: 40 or more mapped cameras, or a spot among its state’s 2 most-mapped places with 25 or more. Pages are capped at 330 for now, and when more places qualify than fit, those with the shortest typical distance go in first. On this data, 280 places with 40 or more mapped cameras have not been let in; the shortest typical distance among them is 0.5 miles (760 m). All 59 places ranked here beyond that distance came in as one of their state’s 2 most-mapped places. The methods page has the full rule.
• They are a part of what is mapped. The 329 places hold 40,051 mapped cameras out of 143,570 nationwide (28%), and 62,796,889 people were counted in them at the 2020 Census.^⁠[6] They come from 8,855 places that have any mapped camera, 2,395 of them with 10 or more. Across those 2,395, page or no page, the median typical distance is 0.5 miles (850 m) and the median half-mile share is 46%, against 0.4 miles (630 m) and 65% here.
• Distance says nothing about what a camera sees. A short distance does not say which way the camera faces, how far it can read a plate, whether it works, or what it has recorded. The map tag describes a camera built to record the plates of passing vehicles,^⁠[1] and nothing here puts any vehicle or person in front of one. See the guide to camera direction and range.
• They measure area, not people. Every grid point counts the same, whether it lands on a block of homes, on open land or on water. The Census Bureau reports a place’s land and its water as separate areas,^⁠[4] and the grid covers both: among the 329 places, 7 have a grid at least a quarter larger than the land area. So the typical point is not the typical resident. Ground outside every place boundary is not measured at all.
• Straight lines, simplified outlines. Distances run as the crow flies, not along streets. The boundary files are simplified shapes the Census Bureau makes for small-scale maps,^⁠[5] with fewer points than its detailed files, and the Bureau says they should not be used for calculating area.^⁠[7] Read every figure built on those outlines as an estimate, not a survey.

The map underneath keeps being edited, the data is refreshed once a week, and these figures are recomputed whenever the site is rebuilt from it. Give the data date with any number you quote.

Overpass stamps each answer with the time its copy of the map was last updated.^⁠[3] This data’s stamp is October 1, 2026 at 21:04 UTC. The table of places these figures are drawn from is on the downloads page.