I have been developing a system that monitors feeds of road closures from Highways England, for both roadworks and incidents. It then applies them to WME with help from some champs (but gradually becoming autonomous). This is all done in (almost) real-time, and the closures are removed as soon as Highways says they are open again. I think this is more responsive than closures entered in advance.
You may come across such closures as you edit the map, and they will all be created or updated by a user called ClosureMonitor. While I believe that the Highways feeds are moderately accurate, there may be occasions when it is just wrong. If you see any reports or comments about such-and-such road not being closed, please send me a PM about it.
:ugeek:
Update: We now monitor all closures for comments and update requests, and act on them as we can.
In late December, just as I got this monitor working sweet-as-a-nut and with much of it automated, Highways England then went and removed the feed I was using. They did provide a “light weight” feed instead, but without nearly as much detail or accuracy as before. With it died my enthusiasm for the project.
Two months later, and I have managed to get the service somewhat working again, albeit only the ‘unplanned events’ and with not so much automation. Hopefully drivers will see some benefit during the day, and get navigated around the worst of it. Again, if you spot any issues caused by this, please get in touch.
I may one day find the energy to also include roadwork closures although the accuracy of the current feeds just aren’t good enough. I’m waiting for HE to publish their new “improved” feeds…
As someone who can frequently be found trying to use an English (*) motorway around 11pm, I would very much appreciate having the overnight closures on Waze again. But of course only if and when a source of accurate information can be found.
(*) I expect Welsh, Scottish & Irish users would be appreciative too, but their information is never going to come from Highways England.
The lack of overnight motorway closures is causing MAJOR headaches.
Prime example tonight.
I requested a route from Hungerford to Harrow, naturally it routed me along the M4 east only for me to find it closed J11 to J10 both ways… I was late for my pick up.
Wednesday I tried to get to Gatwick along the M3. … again to find a full closure.
We need to do something…
Should we for now go back to the old way of doing things and start filling out road closure forms again ???
The big question is do we have an accurate source of information to load these in advance?
I have stopped adding any in my area because of this.
Example; there is currently an entry on roadworks.org for overnight closure on M275 and the Eastbound link to the A3(M) from 22:00 to 06:00 from 1st to 8th March. There are roadside signs in place as well, but these have different dates, 25th Feb to 5th March.
Last night I went straight through at 23:40 without a single cone in sight. :roll:
Update: the monitor seems to be working well, and is now handling closures for all incidents reported by Highways England, and for roadworks on all motorways and some A roads. I’ll gradually increase the coverage for roadworks as it gets better at it.
During the last 3 nights, ClosureMonitor has managed over 60 closures (each night, mostly roadworks), with about half of them being created automatically in real-time. Quite a few closures have started late or finished early, and a few get cancelled at the last minute.
Is there a way of adding in TfL Closures. In London we are quite good off finding the information on overnight closures and putting them on. But I have noticed when looking at the TfL Traffic News twitter feed when i can’t sleep at 4am in the morning that we may have closed the Limehouse Link Tunnel from 10pm to 5am but the when the work is complete at 4am they put on here the road is open.
The same thing happened with the London Marathon Closures I was monitoring it and some of the closures were lifted about an hour earlier in some places. Nothing I could do since I put the closures in by Mega Traffic events but can’t open Level 4 roads.
Does look good. Currently a lorry fire on the M6 SB by Warrington, and the ClosureMonitor has done it’s job.
Tim, as you said that some closures are cancelled last minute or start late/finish early, is there any way that these automated closures could be added into some kind of list/spreadsheet? It would be useful as a reference in case of User Reports where closures have been in place, but weren’t relevant. We would then be able to give an explanation as to why Waze had it shut.
Maybe, one day. Depends on what data they publish, in what format, and under which licence.
I do keep a 1 week log of all closures and how long they were in place for, but I don’t have a way to publish it yet. Feel free to get in touch with me to ask about any past closure that may have occurred.
That segment between the two junctions was closed at 8pm as per the plan, but 5 minutes later there was an update from Highways saying that it was actually the segment within the junction that was closed. It was then reopened around 1:20 am. This same segment was closed again this evening, between 8pm and ~9:20pm. Do you have information to the contrary?
This is the main reason I developed the Closure Monitor - to respond to information direct from Highways, in real time, as things never go to plan. Sometimes their information is incorrect or inaccurate, but it still seems to be better than the published schedules.
I can’t argue with the system, I should’ve done the obvious thing and took a drive up as I only live a couple of mile away. The Highways England info isn’t always perfectly clear in describing what is fully closed and what is lane closures. I’m guessing the diversion PDF if a generic plan incase they close sections at any time during the works.
I agree the Closure Monitor is a great system you’ve developed, did you remember to patent it and now reaping in the royalties from Waze :?:
Not a problem, just more of a curiosity. Why are some (what seems to be) automatic closures marked as done by ClosureMonitor, but some are done by Ian’s username Ditchi56?
Basically the first time Closure Monitor encounters a particular section of road being closed, it flags it up for human confirmation. The human, more usually TImbones than me, then closes the road manually using a reference (in the reason field) that the Monitor will recognise. The Monitor then updates the closure with a better description and end time. So at this point you will have a closure created by a human and updated by the Monitor.
The really clever bit is that it remembers which segments were closed (and in which direction), and if the same closure comes up again (and a lot of roadworks closures occur every night for a period), processes it without manual intervention. In which case the creator will be shown as “ClosureMonitor”.
Over the past 24 hours, there have been 101 roadwork closures, of which it managed 79 automatically. Plus 3 accident closures, all of which were unsurprisingly “new” and needed to be done manually. But even for the accidents, the human can just create the closure and forget about it; Monitor extends the closure period and then reopens it as required.
Caveat: all this is only as good as the information supplied by Highways England. So it isn’t perfect (and only covers motorways and a few of the most major A roads in England only).
Only the closures that were created by ClosureMonitor have been done automatically, which accounts for about two thirds of the 80-90 closures each night. The remaining third are put in manually by myself or Ian in a special way so that the Monitor can track them.
Here’s a chart of the closures over the last 2 days, where the blue line is the total number of active closures, and green is the number of ones processed automatically. Road closures typically begin at 8, 9 and 10pm, and end sometime between midnight and 6am. There’s also a couple works during the day (M40 J12), plus a few unplanned closures for accidents and incidents.
Just so people know (and it might be useful knowledge for dealing with UR’s), the Highways Agency feed went down sometime on Sunday 11th July, and at the time of writing has still not restarted. So Waze is not able to automatically pick up closures to the main roads in England at the moment.
Nothing I could do since I put the closures in by Mega Traffic events but can’t open Level 4 roads. 
