Edinburgh Traffic Cameras: Live A720 & City Cams

Edinburgh Camera Coverage

Features

Interactive Map

Explore Edinburgh and the Lothians visually. Zoom to a specific A720 junction or pull back to view the whole Scotland trunk network at once.

Grid View

Monitor several key points at once. Ideal for watching the Sheriffhall Roundabout, the Queensferry Crossing, and the A8 approach side by side during rush hour.

Route Builder

Plan a journey across the region and see every camera along your path. Perfect for the daily run between Edinburgh and Fife or Glasgow.

Favourites

Save your most-watched feeds. Bookmark the Forth crossing or your usual bypass junction for one-click access every morning.

About Edinburgh Traffic Cameras

Edinburgh sits at the eastern end of Scotland's Central Belt, and its road network carries a heavy daily load. Historic planning data for the city forecast roughly 160,000 vehicles entering Edinburgh each day, a figure projected to climb toward 180,000, with peak congestion concentrated between 07:30 and 09:30 and again from 16:00 to 18:00 on weekdays, according to Wikipedia's transport overview of the city. Those pinch-points make live visual confirmation of the roads genuinely useful before you commit to a route.

Our feeds are drawn from Traffic Scotland, the national traveller information service operated by Transport Scotland. Traffic Scotland runs a 24-hour control centre that monitors the trunk road network using CCTV and roadside equipment, then publishes conditions through its public channels at traffic.gov.scot. TrafficVision.Live gathers those official camera feeds into one interactive interface so you do not have to hop between separate sites.

Street cameras vs traffic cameras

People search for "Edinburgh street cameras" and "Edinburgh traffic cameras" interchangeably, but the two phrases usually point at different things. Traffic cameras are operated by road authorities such as Traffic Scotland to manage congestion and incidents on motorways and major routes like the A720. Street cameras is a broader, everyday term that also covers city-centre and neighbourhood views. On TrafficVision.Live both live side by side: you can watch a strategic bypass junction and a central Edinburgh street scene from the same map. Note that Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras used to enforce the city's Low Emission Zone are a separate enforcement system and are not the public live camera feeds shown here.

Key Routes and Congestion

The A720 Edinburgh City Bypass is the spine of the region's road system. Built in sections between 1980 and 1989 and running as a dual carriageway around the southern fringe of the city, it connects nearly every major radial route, per the Edinburgh City Bypass entry on Wikipedia. Its weak link is the Sheriffhall Roundabout, the only junction on the bypass that is not grade-separated, which is why it draws the heaviest delays and has long been earmarked for a major upgrade.

To the west, the Queensferry Crossing carries the M90 across the Firth of Forth. Opened on 30 August 2017, the 2.7km (1.7 mile) cable-stayed bridge was built with wind shielding specifically to keep traffic moving in conditions that used to force closures on the older bridge, according to Wikipedia's Queensferry Crossing article. The scale of demand across the Forth is long-standing: the original Forth Road Bridge was designed for up to 11 million vehicles a year but had already reached about 23 million by 2006, which is what drove the new crossing. When high winds bite, live cameras on the approaches are the fastest way to judge whether high-sided vehicle restrictions are causing tailbacks back onto the M90 and A90.

Major routes to watch

• A720 City Bypass: The orbital dual carriageway linking the M8, A1, M9, and A71 around the south of the city.
• M90 / Queensferry Crossing: The northern gateway to Fife across the Firth of Forth.
• M8 Corridor: The primary link west toward Glasgow, joining the bypass at Hermiston Gait.
• A8 / A71 Western Approaches: Key feeder routes from Edinburgh Airport and the west.

The Low Emission Zone

Central Edinburgh operates a Low Emission Zone (LEZ). Penalty charges for non-compliant vehicles began on 1 June 2024, and the zone runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, monitored by ANPR cameras, as set out by the City of Edinburgh Council. If your route takes you into the city centre, check whether your vehicle meets the standards before you travel. As of today the LEZ is fully enforced.

Festival season traffic

August transforms the capital. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the world's largest performing arts festival, and its 2026 edition runs from 7 to 31 August. The scale is enormous: the 2025 Fringe recorded more than 2.6 million tickets sold across 3,893 shows and 301 venues, per the Edinburgh Festival Fringe article on Wikipedia. That influx puts sustained pressure on city-centre streets, park-and-ride sites, and the approaches for the whole month, so live cameras become especially valuable for anyone driving in or around Edinburgh during the festivals. Big fixtures at Murrayfield add their own surges; our Murrayfield Stadium traffic guide covers event-day congestion in the west of the city.

Public transport carries much of the load. Edinburgh Waverley handles over 14 million passenger journeys a year on the East Coast Main Line, Haymarket is the city's second station with direct tram links, and the Edinburgh Trams run from the airport through the centre to Newhaven. Even so, the roads stay busy, which is why real-time visibility of the wider UK network helps you plan around the crowds.

FAQ