Telraam, carrying out crowed-sourced traffic counting as a policymaking process

Telraam started in 2019 as a small-scale citizen science experiment for gathering traffic data based on new technology with a pilot in a neighbourhood of the city of Leuven, Belgium. This newly developed sensor, a Telraam, based on Raspberry-Pi hardware and object detection software, allowed citizens to carry out continuous multimodal traffic counts from their own home window. Once installed the Telraam device could count for a long period and by doing so gathering highly interesting insights in mobility trends as well as impacts of both policy measures and events.
Secondly, Telraam is an open data platform where the live traffic counts from all Telraam devices are centralized and visualized on the website. This is deliberately enabling an open, transparent and objective data reporting on highly contentious topics as there are local traffic and mobility measures.
Overwhelmed by the positive feedback after the pilot in 2019 from the citizens-counters, as well as by the immediate interest of numerous policymakers and local authorities for rolling out a Telraam network, Telraam caught momentum. Since then the Telraam platform has steadily grown, and continued the development path. Allowing for improvements in the technology, the platform and adding new features such measuring speed.
Past year an expansion with new Telraam counting networks, commissioned by local cities, first in Flanders, then all over Belgium and later abroad was carried out. There are currently more than 2000 Telraam devices installed, with over 1500 counting traffic as we speak. This proving the scalability and relevance of the Telraam technology and device. For the next period Telraam is aiming for an expansion in a couple of European nations. This will definitely not just be a copy paste model of the existing projects, but will aim for intensively working together with a few strategic local partners and interested authorities to get a national pilot site up and running. Therefore taking into account the local context and mobility and policy culture. With talks with local partners in a few European nations ongoing Telraam is still looking for opportunities to start working together with national local partners. www.telraam.net/en