When Clarke Towson and his brother moved into their elderly mother’s Spotswood home to care for her 10 years ago, one thing quickly became apparent: the Cullen Street property had a clear, uninterrupted view of the West Gate Bridge.
This is unsurprising, as the near 60-metre high and 2.5-kilometre long bridge is almost omnipresent in Melbourne’s inner-west, sweeping across the skyline like a giant slot car track.
But with the two-storey house wedged up against the West Gate Freeway , the view from front porch is unique, offering a clear line of sight along the freeway reserve, over Williamstown Road and Donald McLean Reserve and straight up onto the bridge itself.
If he really wanted, Mr Towson could’ve passed the time by counting the vehicles climbing up the western side of the bridge as they headed towards the city, but as a computer scientist with the Defence Science and Technology (DST) Group, he was far too busy.
Even after retiring in 2021, he was pre-occupied with looking after his mum, negotiating with their neighbours – the Department of Transport – over zoning issues and setting up a not-for-profit trailer hire business.
It was these latter two pursuits that lead him to taking a much closer look at the bridge.
“I set up a trailer business and thought to myself ‘if people hire trailers, they might wanna know if traffic on the bridge is stuffed or no’. Mr Towson said, adding that a solution was sitting right next door in the freeway reserve.
“What I noticed was that VicRoads used to have some cameras, but they’ve all been blacked out,” he said.
While the cameras might’ve been be blacked out, the inside of Mr Towson’s head wasn’t as a lightbulb suddenly switched on.
“If they’ve been blacked out, I’ll solve the problem,” he said of the moment he decided to train a lens of his own on the bridge.
After spending $1200 on a suitable camera, attaching it to his mother’s front porch and using some of the technology skills gained from years as computer scientist, Mr Towson switched on his own 24-7 live stream of traffic going over the West Gate Bridge on Thursday 8 January.
Judging by the response since, it’s solved a problem for many other people too.
“I’ve been getting a lot of messages and feedback and a Facebook post about it got over a thousand likes,” Mr Towson said.
As for the actual number of people accessing the stream via the Spotswood Trailers website and on YouTube, Mr Towson said he’d yet to do an analysis, but a recent visit by Star Weekly found nearly 400 subscribers to the YouTube channel and hundreds of comments.
Along with vision of the traffic flow on the bridge, the live stream includes estimated travel times, traffic alerts, the weather, UV index and air quality, all of which is set to the sounds of the Aussie Drive playlist.
“It’s also got quotes about Melbourne, everything we know and love about Melbourne,” Mr Towson added.
View the live stream at: https://www.youtube.com/@spotswoodtrailers/live
