As a road user I have found no way to access planned road works, when companies and agencies are digging up roads for maintenance or laying cables etc.
What I'd like to see is an automated feed with all scheduled works that will affect traffic - a feed that is timely, geo-coded and can be both retrieved and processed automatically.
The Roads Service do have an RSS feed of road works but it is:
- Incomplete (there are far more road works going on than ever appear in that feed)
- Impossible to process automatically (it contains a Big Block Of Text, so for example there's no way a program can differentiate between road works on Antrim Road in Belfast, in Antrim town, or somewhere in Country Antrim).
People may not be interested in the complete feed, so being able to limit results by location, area or - best of all - route, would be a big bonus. Just getting the data in one big feed would be an excellent first step (and others could build limits and searches on top of the data).