NEATH: Cameras are going up around the town centre next week, and the council says they are not looking at you

Temporary cameras and survey equipment are going up around Neath town centre from next week, and they will be there for three weeks.

Neath Port Talbot Council says the kit is for a traffic study, recording how cars, pedestrians and cyclists move around the town, and that some of it will be more visible than the surveys it normally runs.

Cllr Wyndham Fryer Griffiths, the council’s cabinet member for strategic planning, transport and connectivity, said the scale of the study was the reason. “Traffic studies are routinely carried out across the county borough as part of the council’s ongoing transport planning work. However, due to the scale of this study, some of the temporary equipment may be more noticeable than usual.”

The council says no road closures are expected and the surveys are designed to have minimal effect on anyone driving through.

What the cameras are for

The equipment will be placed at selected points around the town centre to record traffic movements and travel patterns, the council says, so that specialist survey consultants working on its behalf can see how the road network is being used.

The council says it wants an up-to-date picture of the town’s traffic to build an evidence base on congestion, how reliable journey times are, how the network copes when something goes wrong, and what future transport schemes, development and regeneration would do to the roads.

In plain terms, it is the groundwork for deciding what changes to make around the town centre and where the money goes.

“Not intended to identify individual people or vehicles”

Cllr Fryer Griffiths said the cameras were about patterns, not people. “This work is not intended to identify individual people or vehicles. It will help us to gain a better understanding of overall travel patterns and network usage around Neath.”

“We would like to reassure road users that all survey equipment will be temporary and will remain in place only for the period required to collect the necessary information.”

The tram question, three days away

The study is paid for by the Welsh Government through its Regional Transport Fund for 2026/27. That is the pot Neath Port Talbot shares with the region’s three other councils, £24.7m this year, which officers told the regional joint committee earlier this month “is not sufficient for the region to achieve its ambitions”.

The biggest of those ambitions in Neath is a tram. On Friday, councillors on the scrutiny committee take a report on the plan to run tram-trains from Swansea up the Neath valley, with stops at Neath Abbey, Neath Riverside and on to Tonna or Aberdulais. It has been assessed, scored well and recommended, and nobody has committed a penny to it.

The council has not linked the two. But a study built, in its own words, to measure the effect of “future transport improvements, development projects and regeneration investment” on the town’s roads is the sort of evidence a scheme like that needs before anyone will fund it.

The cameras go up in a town where parking is already spilling out of the car parks. Last week the council started work on 100 more spaces at Gnoll Country Park, saying visitors had been parking on nearby residential streets.

The council has not said exactly where the cameras will be or on which day next week they go up.