Live Melbourne - a public open-data board
Pedestrian counts, microclimate, kerbside parking and the urban forest, all pulled live from the City of Melbourne open-data catalogue and shown together in one place. No login. No tracking. No marketing pitch. We put it up because the data is already public and it should be easier to read.
Maintained by Farahan WazerFree to view. No login.Right now in central Melbourne
Pedestrian counters
Outdoor conditions · 0 of 0
Public space · slower signals
Four public datasets, in plain language.
Pedestrian counters
The City of Melbourne runs a network of pedestrian counters around the central city, small sensors mounted on poles and awnings that count how many people walk past, by direction, every minute. The number above is the rolling sum of the last hour across every sensor reporting. The “busiest sensor right now” card names the location with the highest count in the same window.
The dataset records movements, not images. No individual is identified. The City has published this feed for over a decade.
Outdoor air, noise, temperature, wind
A small fleet of City sensors measure outdoor air temperature, humidity, PM2.5, PM10, noise and wind. The board shows the average across every device that reported in the last 24 hours, and a PM2.5 status pill using the US EPA 24-hour breakpoints (Good / Moderate / Poor).
Coverage is partial, not every block has a sensor, so the averages are best read as “outdoor air in the precincts the City monitors,” not the whole city.
On-street bays · honest sample
In-ground bay sensors report whether each kerbside parking bay is occupied or empty. The board paginates the most-recent 500 status updates and shows the occupied / unoccupied split. We do not claim a city-wide bay count from one sample, the card label says “sample of last 500 kerbside updates” for that reason.
Trees catalogued by the City
The City of Melbourne maintains a public register of every street and park tree in the municipality: species, age, dimensions, planting date. The number above is the total record count in that register, plus the most-recent planting we could find. A small, slow signal that says the public realm is being looked after.
Plain and boring, on purpose.
- 01UPSTREAM
City of Melbourne API
Four public datasets on data.melbourne.vic.gov.au - pedestrians, microclimate, kerbside, urban forest. Published openly under CC BY 4.0.
Source of truthCC BY 4.0 - 02PROXY
Next.js Route Handlers
Four small server-side handlers fetch the feeds, shape the response, and never expose an upstream key to the browser.
/api/melbourne/*Same-origin only - 03CACHE
Edge cache, last-known-good
Each response is cached at the edge for the cadence the City updates the dataset. If the upstream is slow or down, the tile shows the last good reading and marks the tile stale instead of going blank.
Edge revalidateStale-but-honest - 04CLIENT
Your browser
Server-rendered HTML. No analytics, no third-party scripts, no cookies, no login.
No trackingNo login
Refresh cadence
Matched to how often the City publishes each feed.
- Pedestrians
- 60 s
- Kerbside parking
- 2 min
- Microclimate
- 5 min
- Urban forest
- 24 h
Polite to the City’s API
Rate-limited per IP. No analytics on this page.
Each request is rate-limited per IP so the board stays a polite consumer of the City’s public API. No analytics, no third-party trackers, no cookies, no login.
Open source in spirit
Fork the architecture for another city.
If a council or community group wants to fork the architecture for another city’s open-data portal, get in touch and we’ll share the code.
Every panel cited.
Pedestrian Counting System - past hour, counts per minute
Open datasetPedestrian Counting System - monthly counts per hour
Open datasetMicroclimate sensors data
Open datasetOn-street Parking Bay Sensors (live)
Open datasetUrban Forest - trees with species and dimensions
Open datasetThe full open-data catalogue
data.melbourne.vic.gov.auhttps://occivar.com/resources/case-studies/live-melbourne-open-dataMade by Occivar, as a public service.
Occivar is a small Melbourne team working on privacy-first occupancy sensing. We do not sell anything on this page. We do not collect anything from you on this page. We built and host this board because the data is already public, the City of Melbourne has done the hard work of publishing it openly, and we thought it should be easier to read in one place.
We will keep this board running for as long as the City’s open-data feeds stay live. If a council, a researcher, a community group or a fellow Melbourne local wants to share notes, fork the architecture for another city, or flag a dataset we should add, the inbox is open at hello@occivar.com.
No newsletter signup. No retargeting. No demo form on this page. If you’re curious what we actually work on outside this board, the rest of the site is one click away, but it is not the point of this page.