Drivers can now see for themselves what the roads in Issaquah look like before venturing out the front door or home from work.

A new city webpage offers links to 26 cameras, which refresh every minute.

While three of the links are from the Washington State Department of Transportation, the city doesn’t have the popular traffic flow maps similar to what WSDOT and GPS use.

The system was live Tuesday afternoon, and there are plans in the works to add a couple more cameras, including one along the new I-90 undercrossing.

The “Traffic Cam” project piggy backs off the city’s larger Intelligent Transportation System, which setup the cameras and built message boards that warn drivers about accidents and road closures.

“The idea behind it was instead of expanding our roads, how do we make our roads more efficient,” said city spokesperson Autumn Monahan, who also worked on the project.

The $3.6 million project paid for with city bonds and state and federal grants, was completed in 2008. A remaining $49,000 from the project grants was allocated to the webpage in April 2010.

The city expects the tool will become the most handy during snowstorms and floods, which are known to cause road closures.

People regularly call in asking about road conditions, and hopefully this will help end some of that, Monahan said.

The idea for the project came out of public input meetings about the larger ITS system, but it also came from monitoring the city’s website.

During the 2008 floods, Monahan posted a road closure map on the site, and in a couple weeks it earned more than 5,000 pageviews, which is unusual for the city’s website, she said. “It was really clear to us that online traffic info was important to our community.”

While the city doesn’t have plans to develop a smartphone “app,” the photo links themselves are refreshed, making it easy to keep bookmarks to specific streets.