Traffic Counting in Bristol

This page explains what "traffic counting" data is available for Bristol.

Vivacity

Council Spending

Bristol City Council have spent over £500,000 with Vivacity Labs over the last 5 years. This implies that BCC have been collecting data from their Vivacity Sensors since 2021.

What are Vivacity Sensors?

You will see these sensors on lampposts throughout the City.

This is "Sensor 19" on Blackswarth Road.

They use cameras and specialised software to monitor vehicles and pedestrians. They work by analysing the shapes of objects in view and "count" each item. They do not read number plates and none of the images are stored once they are processed by the camera itself. This means they cannot be used for enforcement.

See VivaCity Labs for more information.

What do they count?

Each VivaCity Sensor can be configured to monitor a number of "Countlines".

For example, "Sensor 19" on Blackswarth Road (St George West) monitors 6 different "Countlines".

Each Countline can measure movements in one or both directions. These Countlines are all configured to monitor items in Clockwise and Anti-Clockwise directions.

The sensor counts the items by analysing their shape data in real time.

Notes:

Taxis - Only Hackney Cabs are identified as "Taxis". Private Hire Vehicles are classified as "Cars". This is because the software does not analyse number plates or taxi badges and only looks at the shape of the vehicle.

E-Scooters - These are counted as "Pedestrians" as VivaCity are still working on identifying e-scooters as a separate category.

Mobility Scooters - These are counted as "Motorcycles".

Please see Vivacity Sensor Performance Monitoring: June 2022 data (Cambridgeshire County Council) for more information about the accuracy of sensor data.

This is the "movement" data for the "s19_BlackswarthRd_road_bcc001" Countline on Friday 19th December 2025.

Total for day:

By hour:

This is the data for the "s19_BlackswarthRd_path_RHS_bcc001" countline.

Total for day:

By Hour:

And these are the totals for all of the 6 Countlines at this location:

Total for day:

By Hour:

Where is the data?

BCC publish this data on their Bristol Open Data platform.

The data is incomplete as it only contains data from 23/01/2025 onwards, but is updated every few days with the most recent data. You can download the raw data to carry out your own analysis.

BCC have been using VivaCity since 2021 and analysis of some of this data can be viewed in the "Bristol Cycling Trends" report from 2021.

It would be helpful if BCC published all of the VivaCity data that we have paid for.

Traffic Journey Counts

[Coming Soon]

Annual Traffic Counts

[Coming Soon]