Technical deep-dives into traffic data, API architecture, and the challenges of normalizing 57 jurisdictions.
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.