Cameras have been popping up on poles in a number of neighborhoods across the Rochester region, leaving residents with questions about what information is being collected and why.

Mary and Mark Mann noticed something strange during their nightly walk in their Brighton neighborhood earlier this week.

“I saw the chains all over the pole which we hadn’t seen before,” Mary says. “Looked up and was like, whoa, what is that? My son was like, that’s a camera and it’s pointed over toward the circle there, which is kinda interesting — we thought if it was a traffic thing it would be pointed down the other way.”

Susan Cavanagh had similar thoughts when a camera was attached to a street sign right in front of her Penfield home, “1) who put it here? 2) what are they looking at and why is it pointed at a residential neighborhood and not a main road?” Cavanagh wondered.

Nicole Felts wanted to know the same thing when one went up at the entrance to the cul-de-sac where she lives. “I looked up the number for the state DOT, called them — they said we have no idea what it is, told me to call Monroe County,” Felts says. “So I called Monroe County DOT, no idea. They told me to call the town. Called the town of Penfield, I talked to three different people at the town, and had no idea, they told me to call 911.”

The supervisors in many of the towns where these cameras are appearing tell News10NBC they didn’t have much advanced notice.

“The way I learned that they were deploying these cameras last week was when I started getting calls about them (from residents) out of the blue,” says Bill Smith, Town of Pittsford Supervisor.

After News10NBC started making calls to get some answers, the New York State Department of Transportation emailed the town supervisors information about the cameras.

“These are traffic counting cameras,” Smith said. “I asked them what they do, do they take videos? Actually record video activity in the neighborhood? And they said no, the cameras only serve to create a register, or a list, of how many cars are going through.”

In a statement to News10NBC a spokesman for NYSDOT says, “The traffic counters observed along various streets in Perinton and other locations belong to a NYSDOT vendor and are being operated in accordance with NYSDOT’s federally mandated and funded requirement to collect traffic volume data across New York State on an annual basis. Traffic-counting cameras are now the industry standard and are considered safer to operate and more efficient than previous counters, which often required workers to enter the roadway.”

“It has a little bit of a big brother feel to it to me,” says Mike Mann. Both he and Mary say at the very least, NYSDOT should have alerted neighbors about where the cameras were going to be place and why so there wasn’t confusion.

Aside from the lack of communication, both Cavanagh and Felts are wondering why the state is bothering to count cars on dead-end streets, cul-de-sacs and sparsely traveled roads.

In a follow-up statement to a list of further questions from News10NBC, the DOT spokesman says, “Traffic counters – which are used solely for the purpose of collecting vehicle counts – are placed on a select number of randomly chosen local streets each year. Local officials were notified about the placement of the counters in advance and NYSDOT expects the counting operation to be concluded and the cameras removed by the end of the summer.”