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, so you can see how fresh the reading is instead of trusting a bare flag.

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 that are actually open on your route.

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:

{
  "warnings": [
    {
      "type": "weigh_station",
      "severity": "warning",
      "title": "Weigh station ahead — open",
      "status": "open",
      "as_of": "2026-06-29T14:58:00Z",
      "distance_along_route_m": 48200,
      "projected_arrival_time": "2026-06-29T15:40:00Z",
      "source": "GA 511",
      "geometry": { "type": "Point", "coordinates": [-84.10, 33.60] },
      "properties": { "is_open": true, "status": "open" }
    },
    {
      "type": "weigh_station",
      "severity": "info",
      "title": "Weigh station ahead — closed",
      "status": "closed",
      "as_of": "2026-06-29T14:58:00Z",
      "distance_along_route_m": 142000,
      "source": "GA 511",
      "geometry": { "type": "Point", "coordinates": [-84.40, 33.70] },
      "properties": { "is_open": false, "status": "closed" }
    }
  ]
}

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 open scale and grey out the closed one; a driver app can speak only the open ones as the truck approaches.

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 subtle but important detail: 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 honestly as closed, with the timestamp to prove it’s current.

Where the Status Comes From

The open/closed state is only as good as the agency that publishes it. Road511 carries the status wherever a state DOT’s own 511 feed reports it — states like Georgia and Idaho publish a live open/closed flag for their scale houses, and we pass it straight through with its timestamp. Where a state lists only the station’s location with no operational state, the warning still fires as a plain “station ahead,” same as before. No guessing, no crowd-sourced “someone said it was open” — it’s the DOT’s own signal or nothing, and the as_of timestamp tells you which states are giving you a fresh reading.

That’s deliberate. 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