Is the Weigh Station Ahead Open? Now Your Route Knows

Ask a driver which thing their phone actually gets right, and weigh-station status is near the top of the list. Knowing a scale house is coming up is useful. Knowing whether it’s open or closed right now is the part that changes the next ten minutes — whether you ease into the scale lane or stay in your lane and keep rolling.

Most routing APIs treat a weigh station as a dot on the map: “station ahead.” That’s a location, not a decision. The open/closed state is what a driver and a dispatcher actually plan around — and where a state’s own 511 feed reports it, that signal exists. Road511’s truck routing now carries it onto the route.

What Changed

Weigh and inspection stations have always come back in the routing response’s warnings[] array. What’s new is that each station warning now carries its operational status, not just its position:

• status — open, closed, or unknown, taken straight from the DOT feed that reports it.
• as_of — the observation time of that status: when we last confirmed the station in an upstream poll, not when its value last changed. A scale that has been open all week still reports an as_of from minutes ago. It’s refreshed at least every 15 minutes, so treat it as accurate to the quarter hour rather than to the second.

And the status changes the severity. An open station is the one a truck has to act on, so it’s raised to warning severity; a closed or unknown station stays info. That one change makes the status filterable with the knob you already have — set min_severity: "warning" and the only stations you get back are the ones a DOT is actively reporting as open on your route.

Read the next section before you build on this. The field is only as wide as the feeds behind it, and today it is narrow: most stations on most routes come back unknown. That is the honest answer, and it is the reason the unknown value exists at all.

On the Route

Nothing new to wire. It rides the same single call to POST /api/v1/routing/route that returns the truck-aware route and its corridor warnings. The station entries simply carry more. Here is the Arkansas Highway Police scale at Alma on I-40 eastbound, as the feed had it on 3 August 2026 (abridged — distances and arrival times depend on your own route):

{
  "warnings": [
    {
      "type": "weigh_station",
      "severity": "warning",
      "title": "Weigh station ahead — open",
      "status": "open",
      "as_of": "2026-08-03T12:56:17Z",
      "distance_along_route_m": 48200,
      "projected_arrival_time": "2026-08-03T15:40:00Z",
      "source": "AR",
      "source_id": "I-40-Eastbound-Highway Police Weigh Station",
      "provenance": "authoritative",
      "geometry": { "type": "Point", "coordinates": [-94.29494, 35.45872] },
      "properties": { "city": "Alma", "is_open": true, "mile_marker": "9" }
    }
  ]
}

And here is the far more common case — a state that publishes the scale house but not its state. Idaho’s East Boise station, same route shape, no operational signal behind it:

{
  "type": "weigh_station",
  "severity": "info",
  "title": "Weigh station ahead",
  "status": "unknown",
  "as_of": "2026-08-03T12:59:41Z",
  "source": "ID",
  "provenance": "authoritative",
  "geometry": { "type": "Point", "coordinates": [-116.05744, 43.43088] },
  "properties": { "operator": "ITD", "mile_marker": "65.694" }
}

Same shape your code already reads — type, severity, distance_along_route_m, projected_arrival_time — plus the two new fields. A dispatcher UI can light up the reported-open scale and leave the rest neutral; a driver app can speak only the open ones as the truck approaches. Note the title: an unknown station says “weigh station ahead” and stops there. It never guesses a state it doesn’t have.

Want Only the Open Ones?

Because open stations are warning and the rest are info, the enrichment knobs do the filtering — no client-side sorting:

• "min_severity": "warning" — drop closed and unknown stations; surface only what’s open. (Critical hazards like bridge clearances always pass through regardless.)
• "exclude_types": ["weigh_stations", "inspection_stations"] — suppress scale-house notices entirely for a UI that doesn’t show them.

"enrichment": {
  "min_severity": "warning"
}

Closed Doesn’t Mean Gone

A design decision worth stating, because it governs what you’ll see when a feed does start reporting closures: a closed weigh station still appears. It would be easy — and wrong — to drop a station from the data the moment it closes; then a driver checking the map at 3am sees nothing and assumes there’s no scale on the corridor at all. A station that’s closed right now is still a station that exists and will reopen. So it stays on the map, in the data, and on the route — reported as closed at info severity, with its timestamp. In practice we have not yet seen a NA feed publish a closure: the states that report anything at all have so far reported open.

Where the Status Comes From — and How Little of It There Is

The open/closed state is only as good as the agency that publishes it, and most agencies publish nothing. As of 3 August 2026, of the roughly 980 weigh and inspection stations in our North American dataset, the large majority return unknown. The one jurisdiction whose own feed carries a live open/closed flag is Arkansas — its Highway Police scale houses on I-30, I-40, I-49 and I-55, which is what the example above is drawn from. South Dakota’s feed has the field and leaves it blank, so we report unknown rather than inventing a closure. Everyone else — Idaho, Alberta, Ontario, Caltrans, the CARS states — publishes the scale house and not its state. A large share of the national inventory comes from the federal NTAD weigh-in-motion dataset, which is sensor inventory: a location, permanently unknown, and not a scale house you pull into.

We are stating that plainly rather than letting a coverage map imply otherwise. If you are evaluating this for a fleet, evaluate it on your corridors: run a route and count how many stations come back with a status. Outside Arkansas today, the answer is zero — and the value of the feature is the plumbing being in place, not the coverage. We are actively working the source side to widen it, and this post will be updated as states come online.

What we won’t do is fill the gap with guesses. No crowd-sourced “someone said it was open,” no inferring a closure from silence, no modelled probability presented as an observation. It’s the DOT’s own signal or it’s unknown. For a compliance-adjacent decision, a field you can trust when it’s populated beats a field that’s always populated and sometimes wrong.

The scope is deliberate, too. True transponder bypass — the pre-clearance that waves a truck past the scale — is an enforcement-agency program and out of scope. Status isn’t: it’s public 511 data, and attaching it to a truck-aware route is exactly the kind of authoritative, normalized signal that’s otherwise split across 50 separate state apps.

Try It

• API docs — the full warnings[] reference, including status and as_of on station types
• Free API key — no credit card, 14-day trial
• Truck routing with hazard warnings — how the full corridor warnings[] channel works