How Busy Is Toon is here to help you feel safe and prepared when visiting your city centre. You have access to still images updated usually every five minutes from around the city centre, access to still images usually updated every 15 minutes of traffic cams of popular roads in and out of the city centre, live data on car park capacity, real time bus data, and up to date rules and safety guidance from councils and government.

The platform was initially built in 2020 in collaboration with Newcastle City Council, NE1, Newcastle University’s Research Software Engineering team, and hedgehog lab, using data from the Urban Observatory, and data analytics from National Innovation Centre for Data. Since then we have updated and improved the site based on user feedback.

The traffic light status on the homepage is based on footfall data from Grey Street alone which is processed using computer vision technology. The information is transmitted back to the Urban Observatory (https://urbanobservatory.ac.uk/)and the website is automatically updated using the data collected. The footage is not routinely monitored. More information is available in the Urban Observatory's privacy statement https://urbanobservatory.ac.uk/privacy-policy The traffic camera information is managed by the Urban Traffic Management Centre UTMC) and is also available, with other images, at https://netrafficcams.co.uk/. The real time bus location data is provided by all bus operators and is accessed from the ‘Bus Open Data Service’ (BODS) https://www.bus-data.dft.gov.uk/ Parking information is managed by the Urban Observatory ( https://urbanobservatory.ac.uk/).

How Busy Is Toon was 1 of 11 funded collaborative projects through the MHCLG Local Digital COVID-19 Challenge. Research was conducted by hedgehog lab with people all around the UK who gave valuable feedback and insight into what they would like to see on this website.