Live cameras in Tracy, United States

Tracy is the second-largest city in San Joaquin County, California, on the western edge of the Central Valley where the farmland meets the Altamont hills. About 93,000 people lived here at the 2020 census, and the city has kept growing as Bay Area workers look for more affordable homes. Tracy started as a railroad town: Central Pacific crews, many of them Chinese laborers, built the lines through the area in the 1860s and 1870s, and a junction station was named for railroad director J. J. Tracy. The town was incorporated in 1911 and grew as a farming center.

Its place in rock history is less cheerful. In December 1969 the nearby Altamont Speedway hosted the Altamont Free Concert with the Rolling Stones, a day remembered for violence in the crowd.

The interstate triangle

The cameras on this page come from Caltrans through its CWWP2 feed, the same images used on QuickMap. They are still pictures refreshed every few minutes. Tracy sits inside a triangle of interstates: Interstate 205 along the north side of the city, Interstate 5 to the east, and Interstate 580 to the southwest. Together they carry one of the heaviest commuter flows in Northern California, as drivers head over the Altamont Pass toward Livermore and the Bay Area every morning and come back every evening.

Picture times are Pacific, the same as San Francisco. The climate is semi-arid, with very hot, dry summers that bring many days above one hundred degrees, and cool winters. Dense tule fog can settle over the valley floor on winter mornings, cutting visibility on the interstates, and strong westerly winds blow through the Altamont Pass, which is why the hills are covered with wind turbines. The worst traffic usually comes before seven in the morning westbound and in the late afternoon eastbound.

Nearby, Manteca and Lathrop lie to the east along Highway 120, and Livermore's wine country is just over the pass.

Sources: Tracy, California - Wikipedia · Altamont Pass - Wikipedia · Caltrans QuickMap.