Please can you check this one out on the A590/A591 in Cumbria. There are a couple of UR's and one.network is reporting the road as closed and disruption up until 7th December, as is Highways England. Twitter is suggesting it's re-open now

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Just found this which according to the dates it should have been completed but HE on Twitter yesterday reported they'd only just moved onto the next stretch.

Seeing a few more URs on this. It now shows on one.network so will ClosureMonitor pick these up now?

Link.

I believe the HA data comes from three main sources

1. Their own database of planned works. Given the high priority nature of the roads they're maintaining, these works are usually planned out in quite meticulous detail, and so if they say they're going to close a section of road for a given period of time, they usually mean it.

2. Their traffic flow sensors.

3. Ad-hoc reports sent in by HA staff out on the road network, or generated from within the control centres by monitoring the camera feeds.


Unless you've got access to the uncensored camera feeds, I'm not sure where you get the idea that many of their cameras don't work. The public feeds they provide may be down due to server issues, but this wouldn't affect the HA's own feeds from those same cameras, and if there's been an accident then it's standard procedure for them to deliberately shut off the public feeds from any cameras being used to monitor the affected section of road. Based on my own experiences of using the public feeds for the SE England region over the last decade, I'd say the majority of their cameras appear to be working at any given moment.


Is the HA data we get completely reliable? No, of course not. From time to time stuff happens that causes their plans to go awry and roads end up not being closed when they've said they would be, or closures get extended due to overrunning works without the closure data being updated accordingly. And from time to time they either won't be aware of a closure, or won't have updated their data feed with the details of the closure.

But compared to the situation we were in before Tim's closure monitor came online, where NO pre-planned closures existed in Waze unless one of us had gone to the trouble of researching the details and adding the data manually, and only if we were aware of the upcoming closure in the first place, and where realtime closures due to accidents etc were even less reliably shown in Waze, what we have now is a significant step forwards. Will drivers still occasionally be directed to drive along sections of HA-controlled road which are closed in reality? Of course - as I just said, the HA data isn't perfect. Does this diminish the value to the end user of the closure monitor system as it currently stands? Not in the slightest.

On the subject of manually adding closures, would this then prevent CM from managing the closures on those segments if it came back to life whilst the manual closures were still in place?

This is something that's also crossed my mind when seeing some closure MPs raised for roads which look as if they ought to be handled by CM, but where you don't know for certain it will be. Should we ignore those MPs and assume CM will deal with them, or is it safe to manually add in the closures without it affecting CM's ability to take over managing the closure if required?

Would it be advantageous to have a list of all segments or some other means of identifying sections of road which CM definitely can handle by itself?

iainhouse wrote:

Twister-UK wrote:Would it be advantageous to have a list of all segments or some other means of identifying sections of road which CM definitely can handle by itself?

Definitely! In fact, if you could add something to WME OpenData, similar to the "Highlight PRN" option, that would be pretty fantastic.

That was where my thoughts were headed, yes...

Timbones wrote:

Twister-UK wrote:On the subject of manually adding closures, would this then prevent CM from managing the closures on those segments if it came back to life whilst the manual closures were still in place?

The Monitor cannot take over existing closures, unless someone manually edits the description to be the Highways' event ID, like #1293302. I am tempted to have it overwrite any in-app user closures though.

FYI: you should not be seeing any MPs for planned closure by Highways England, as I had requested that Waze filter these ones out. If you are seeing any (for instance on Motorways), please let me know.

It would be useful if CM could remove any existing closures which overlap the closure period it wants to implement, just in case an editor who isn't aware of CM has then added manual closures based on having found out about an upcoming closure.

On the point about not seeing any MPs based on HE data, this is where I think things start getting a bit confusing - the ones I'm seeing around the London area are all tagged either as Elgin or TfL, but since they're related to roads (e.g. M4, A404 etc.) within HE's network of responsibility, the question then is whether or not these are closures which are simply also being reported by these other parties for some reason, but which would still end up being applied by CM anyway, or if they're closures which HE itself has no knowledge of despite being on HE-controlled roads and which therefore wouldn't be handled by CM.

Timbones wrote:I'll see if I can extra the necessary data for you...

Cheers.

Err, fellow holder of the sacred name, you may want to re-read what the edit history is telling you here... at 21:33, CM changed the *start* time of the closure from 20:00 to 20:25, leaving the *end* time untouched from the originally set value of 06:01 - this presumably then explains why the UR was raised earlier today.

So this looks as if CM received an updated from Highways England at around the time of the reopening, but for some reason (either a glitch in CM itself, or a bit of misleading data from HE) instead of realising that the closure could now be removed, it thought the update was to indicate a change in the starting time of the closure instead.

atrophicshiner wrote:Now if there was someone I could blame for not making the extended segment history clearer

Who, what... sorry, can't quite hear y.... bzzzzzzttfzakkkk [NO CARRIER]

Did CM or the HE feed fall over again at some point on Saturday? Been looking at a few URs today referring to junction closures on the M1 and M25 last night, but the most recent CM activity I can see in the segment histories was from Saturday morning as it cleared up the closures from Friday night.

Is CM having problems again? I notice we've both ended up adding manual closures on the A20 this evening...

Given how much reliance we now place on CM to handle closures on high priority roads like this, and how much trouble it can cause when something stops it from doing so, is there any way we can easily find out whether or not CM is expected to be working at any given moment in time, so that if we see a road that we think ought to be closed but isn't, we can check to see if CM is still alive and kicking before rolling up our sleeves and adding stuff by hand?