Traffic Analytics: Aggregate Data for Road Planning Without Privacy Trade-Offs

March 20, 2025 – As cities and states grapple with rising traffic fatalities and aging infrastructure, a new tool from Flock Safety promises to deliver the data needed for smarter road planning—without the privacy concerns that often accompany license plate recognition (LPR) systems. Called Traffic Analytics, the product was released in early 2025 and is already being adopted by law enforcement agencies, state and local Departments of Transportation (DOTs), and municipalities across the U.S.

Unlike Flock’s core LPR platform, which captures individual vehicle records for public safety investigations, Traffic Analytics strips away personal identifiers from the start. It aggregates observations from existing Flock cameras into statistical trends—volume, vehicle mix, registration states, and speed patterns—while never storing or linking data to a specific plate, driver, or vehicle.

“This is a fundamentally different product from LPR,” said a Flock spokesperson in a statement provided to us. “Traffic Analytics was designed from the ground up for transportation planning, not enforcement. No plate data, no individual vehicle records, no ability to identify a driver.”

Why Aggregate Traffic Data Matters Now

The need for granular traffic data has never been greater. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), over 11,000 people died in speed-related crashes in 2023 alone. Many states now require DOTs to report speeding metrics, vehicle classification, and volume trends to qualify for federal infrastructure funding. Yet traditional methods—manual counting, pneumatic tubes, or inductive loops—are costly, labor-intensive, and offer only snapshots.

“Cities have been flying blind on their own roadways,” said Dr. Karen Liu, a transportation policy researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who reviewed the Traffic Analytics specifications. “They need year-round, 24/7 data to understand how traffic patterns shift with seasons, events, construction, and even changing commuting habits post-pandemic. Flock’s approach, using existing cameras, could dramatically lower the barrier to entry.”

Flock claims its cameras are already deployed in thousands of communities for public safety. Traffic Analytics layers a separate analytics pipeline on top of that hardware, meaning agencies that already own Flock cameras can activate the feature without new installations—a key selling point for budget-strapped DOTs.

What Traffic Analytics Contains (and Doesn’t)

The product dashboard displays aggregate statistics broken into four categories:

• Traffic Volume: Vehicle counts in 15-minute, hourly, daily, monthly, and annual intervals, with trends by time of day, day of week, and season.
• Vehicle Mix: Six categories—passenger vehicles, buses, single-unit trucks, combination trucks, and two additional classes—so planners can distinguish between commuter traffic and heavy freight.
• Roadway User Characteristics: The share of vehicles registered in different states, plus vehicle type breakdowns. No individual vehicle is identified.
• Speed Patterns: Group-level metrics including average speed, 85th percentile speed, pace speed, speed differential, and the percentage of vehicles exceeding the speed limit. These are reported in 15-minute blocks and cannot be used to identify any single driver’s speed.

Crucially, Traffic Analytics does not contain LPR footage. An LPR record includes a plate image, plate number, state, vehicle make, color, body type, and exact timestamp. Under Flock’s standard policies, LPR data is subject to retention periods set by the customer—often 30 days—and can only be accessed for legitimate public safety purposes. Traffic Analytics, by contrast, retains aggregate statistics for up to five years to support long-term planning, but the underlying LPR records are deleted according to the customer’s retention schedule.

“The five-year retention of aggregate totals does not mean the LPR data is kept that long,” the spokesperson emphasized. “When an LPR record reaches its retention limit, it is permanently deleted. The aggregate numbers are mathematically impossible to reverse-engineer into individual records.”

Real-World Use Cases

DOTs and municipalities are already putting Traffic Analytics to work in several ways, according to early adopters who spoke on background:

• Seasonal Tourism Planning: A coastal city in the Southeast uses the tool to track the surge of out-of-state vehicles during summer months. The data helps allocate police patrols, schedule road maintenance, and plan for emergency services capacity.
• Freight Routing: A Midwestern county DOT uses the vehicle mix data to identify roads where heavy truck traffic has increased, signaling a need for more durable pavement. The same data helps justify state funding for truck bypass projects.
• Event Preparedness: A city hosting a major sports event analyzed the share of out-of-region vehicles before and after the event to determine whether additional parking and transit resources were needed.
• Speed Safety Interventions: A suburban town used the 85th percentile speed metric to identify a corridor where speeds were consistently above the posted limit. They deployed traffic calming measures and, six months later, used the tool to measure a 12% reduction in the percentage of vehicles speeding.

How Speed Statistics Work—and Why They Can’t Be Used for Enforcement

A common question raised by privacy advocates and policymakers is whether aggregated speed data could be misused for individual enforcement. Flock is explicit: Traffic Analytics cannot be used to issue a speeding ticket. The system does not store the speed of any single vehicle; it only reports de-identified statistics for groups of vehicles over 15-minute intervals.

“This is a planning and safety tool, not a speed enforcement tool,” the spokesperson said. “It can show that a particular roadway has a speeding problem, but it cannot tell you which vehicle was speeding. No Flock product can be used for individual speed enforcement.”

This distinction is important under state laws that regulate the use of automated speed enforcement. In states like California and Texas, legislation explicitly prohibits the use of data derived from cameras for issuing citations unless the system is specifically certified as a speed enforcement device. Traffic Analytics does not meet that definition.

Data Ownership and Privacy Protections

Data ownership remains with the agency that operates the cameras. A DOT, highway department, or municipal partner cannot access the data without explicit permission from the owning agency. Flock does not sell the data, and the analytics are displayed only in a dashboard accessible to authorized users within the agency.

“We treat aggregated data as an extension of the customer’s private data,” the spokesperson added. “The ownership model is the same as our LPR platform: the agency owns it, we secure it, and we do not monetize it.”

A Growing Trend in Transportation Analytics

Flock is not the only company offering aggregated traffic data from existing camera networks. Competitors like Iteris and INRIX provide similar analytics from dedicated sensors or aggregated GPS data. However, Flock’s competitive edge lies in its existing LPR camera footprint—over 2 million cameras deployed across the U.S., according to company estimates. That means agencies can tap into a dense sensor network without additional capital expenditure.

“The key innovation is that Flock is repurposing a security camera network for transportation planning,” said Dr. Liu. “That’s a huge efficiency gain. But it also means agencies must be transparent about how the data is being used, because the public may conflate the two products.”

Flock has faced criticism from privacy groups over its LPR platform, which has been used in some cases to track individuals for non-criminal purposes. The company has responded by tightening access controls and introducing policies like the “30-day default” retention for LPR data. Traffic Analytics, with its privacy-by-design approach, is part of that strategy.

Looking Ahead

As Traffic Analytics rolls out to more cities and counties, Flock plans to add additional metrics, such as pedestrian and cyclist counts (where cameras are positioned to capture them), and integration with third-party planning tools like GIS software. The company