About this site
Knowing the road is busy right now is easy. Every sat-nav does it, for free, better than a website could. What none of them tell you is which hour to pick before you set off, and that is the only question this site tries to answer.
Why it exists
National Highways has published years of readings from the sensors in the road surface, free and open, for anyone to use. Hardly anybody does. Ask when the M6 is worst on a Friday and the answers you find are forum threads and guesswork, which is odd when the measured answer has been sitting in public the whole time.
So this site takes that archive, groups it by day and hour, and publishes the pattern for 41 roads and 417 sensors. Nothing here is modelled or predicted. It is a count of what actually happened, arranged so you can read it.
What it will not do
It will not pretend to be live. The sensor archive runs months behind. Anywhere this site shows a congestion figure, that figure is a pattern, and the page says so rather than leaving you to assume otherwise.
It will not claim to know about crashes. The live feed available to this site covers roadworks and lane closures. There is no accident data in it, so there are no accident alerts here and there never will be unless that changes.
It will not name a place it cannot show its working for. Junction names are worked out from coordinates, so each one is printed with the distance it was found at, and anything too far from a junction is left unnamed.
It will not pad itself out. Roads without enough sensors to say anything useful are kept out of search results on purpose, rather than published as filler. There are fewer pages here than there could be, deliberately.
Who pays for it
Nobody. There are no adverts on this site, no affiliate links, no sponsored entries, no paid listings and nothing for sale. No organisation funds it and no one has paid for a road to appear or to be described a particular way.
It is able to work that way because it costs almost nothing to run: the data is free, the hosting is a free tier, and the whole thing comes to roughly a pound a month. If that ever changes, this page changes with it.
Where the data comes from
Speeds and vehicle counts are published by National Highways under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Junction names come from OpenStreetMap contributors and districts from postcodes.io. None of them endorse this site or have checked it, and nothing here should be read as official.
The full method, including what gets thrown away and why, is on the how these figures are measured page.