Technical deep-dives into traffic data, API architecture, and the challenges of normalizing 57 jurisdictions.
“Crash on I-80, right lane blocked” describes two completely different events — a fender bender on dry pavement, or black ice at a quarter mile of visibility. Road511 attaches the nearest roadside station’s reading to every incident the moment it appears, across 4,641 stations in 32 states and provinces, and turns “bad weather causes crashes” into severity-by-conditions you can query.
Live incident feeds answer “what’s closed right now” — the wrong question when the load ships in three weeks. Road511 normalizes 3,442 planned construction projects from eight states and provinces into one schema with projected start and end dates, filterable by the window you’re planning for — plus a record of every time an agency moves those dates.
Knowing a scale house is coming up is useful; knowing whether it’s open right now is what changes the next ten minutes. Road511’s truck routing now carries DOT-reported weigh- and inspection-station open/closed status on the route — a status and an as_of timestamp on every station warning, with open stations raised to warning severity so min_severity returns only the ones you must pull into.
A legal break is worthless if there’s nowhere to stop — and the driver finds out at 2am, too late to plan around it. How a normalized truck-parking API puts the national inventory plus live space counts (where states run TPIMS) right on the corridor, tied to the HOS clock so the break is planned, not gambled.
A route that’s clear at dispatch hits a lane closure 300 miles out. Work zones are the most dynamic disruption on a corridor — and the hardest to track across two dozen state DOT feeds. How a normalized WZDX API puts active and planned closures, lane drops, and speed reductions right on the route.
Fifty states and a dozen provinces, each with its own 511 system, format, and refresh cadence. The five road-data problems fleet and logistics-software teams keep hitting — the integration tax, low bridges, spring load limits, HOS-and-parking, and stale feeds — and what actually takes each one off your plate.
A nav app won’t tell the dispatcher where the 11-hour clock runs out — or whether there’s legal parking when it does. Send the driver’s HOS clock with the route and get back every required break and drive-limit stop, each with the truck parking reachable before the deadline and a feasible flag. US, Canada, and EU regimes.
A sedan’s toll rate isn’t a 5-axle, 36-tonne tractor’s rate. Add include: ["tolls"] to a route request and get the truck’s real toll cost — a per-currency total plus a per-section breakdown of every toll system, priced against your weight, axles, and hazmat class.
Flow APIs tell you how fast the road is moving — not that your 4.2 m load won’t clear the overpass. POST /api/v1/routing/route returns a truck route plus a warnings array from Road511’s live 511 data: clearances, weight and truck restrictions, rail crossings, work zones, and weather, scored against your truck profile.
Fleet cost is two numbers: hours lost to congestion and money burned on fuel. Combine Road511’s traffic events API with weekly EIA / StatCan fuel prices to put a dollar figure on any corridor — with a worked Chicago→Dallas example.
A from-scratch walkthrough: live incidents, camera popups with images, and road condition overlays in under 100 lines of JavaScript — powered by Road511’s GeoJSON API.
Normalized spring weight restrictions from MN, WI, MI, ON, QC, and NS — polyline geometry, active date ranges, and a corridor endpoint that flags every restriction your load would violate along a planned route.
Standard RFC 7946 GeoJSON for every traffic event, camera, sign, and POI — bounding box and radius queries that drop straight into Leaflet, Mapbox, MapLibre, ArcGIS, and QGIS. PostGIS-backed, no XML wrangling.
Live messages from every Dynamic Message Sign across 30+ US states and Canadian provinces. One API, normalized text, GeoJSON output, and a historical archive of message changes nobody else publishes.
Every US state and Canadian province runs its own 511 system with a different format. Here's how the adapter registry pattern normalizes Transnomis JSON, ArcGIS, GraphQL, WZDx, protobuf, and more into one schema.
10,000+ live camera feeds from 40+ states with direct image URLs. No other API provides this — here's how to use it in your app.
FHWA National Bridge Inventory — height clearances, weight ratings, posting status. Query by corridor with PostGIS spatial search.