About this site

Where the data comes from

Incident, roadworks and closure data comes from National Highways’ Transport Data Feeds, the same source the regional traffic control centres publish to. Welsh trunk roads (the A55, A470, A494 and the Welsh M4) use Traffic Wales’ incident and roadworks feeds. Scottish trunk roads (the M8, M74, M9, A9, A90 and the rest) use Traffic Scotland’s DATEX II service. All three update roughly every 5 minutes, and every page shows when it was last refreshed, so you can judge how fresh the picture is.

Scotland adds something England’s feed doesn’t publish: measured journey times. Traffic Scotland times vehicles along signed corridors (M8 J8 Baillieston to J28 Glasgow Airport, for example) and compares each one with the normal time for that hour, so the Scottish pages show how much slower a route is running, not just whether something has been reported on it.

Three feeds drive the site: road and lane closures (planned and live), the messages showing on the digital overhead signs, and temporary speed limits through roadworks.

What we show and what we don’t

We cover the motorways and major A-roads managed by National Highways in England, the Welsh trunk road network and Scotland’s main trunk roads. Local council roads and city centres are not covered. Where a road spans both managed and local sections (like the A38), we show the managed sections and say so on the page.

How to read the pages

• Red means a live incident: a collision, obstruction or unplanned closure.
• Amber means slow traffic or active roadworks with a delay.
• Green means the road is running normally in both directions.
• On Scottish roads, delays are measured: the live journey time against Traffic Scotland’s normal time for that hour. A route counts as slow at 3 minutes over.
• Earlier today lists collisions, breakdowns, obstructions and lanes shut on the overhead signals that have left the feed since midnight. The feeds we use only list what is live, so we keep our own record: we check every road every 5 minutes, and “cleared by” is the first check the incident was missing from. “Reported” is the feed’s own start time.

Junction data

Motorway junction lists are built from OpenStreetMap (© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL): the junction number, the interchange name where it has one, the roads it connects to, and the destinations on the signs. We match that against the live incident feed, so the junction-by-junction view shows where a report actually sits on the road, and each junction has its own page.

Junction pages for the quieter motorways are left out of search results on purpose. A page nobody searches for, with nothing much to say, helps no one.

Licensing and credits

Powered by National Highways’ Transport Data Feeds. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Traffic Wales data is used with the required attribution. Scottish traffic information comes from Traffic Scotland, and the intellectual property rights in that data belong to Transport Scotland. UK Traffic Now is an independent site and is not affiliated with National Highways, Traffic Wales, Traffic Scotland, Transport Scotland or the Department for Transport.

Contact

Spotted something wrong, or want a road added? Email hello@uktrafficnow.co.uk. Start with the full road list or jump straight to M6 traffic.