How can we help?

No password needed — we use magic links. Just enter your email address on the sign-in page and we'll send you a one-click link that logs you straight in. You can also sign in with your Google account if you prefer.

After signing in, head to the Route Guardian dashboard and tap "Add route". Type in your start point and destination (any address or postcode in England), give the route a name like "Work commute" or "School run", and hit Save. We'll start watching that corridor for roadworks immediately.

You can save up to three routes — plenty for a commute, a school run, and one other regular journey. If you need to swap one out, you can delete and recreate routes at any time.

Yes. On the route creation map you can drag the route line to make it follow a different road — useful if you always take a specific back road, for example. On desktop, hover over the route and drag. On mobile, tap "Adjust route" to enter edit mode, then tap points on the map to thread the route through them.

As soon as your route is saved we start monitoring it. If there are works starting tomorrow you'll receive an evening digest that same night. Emergency or urgent works that appear during the day trigger an immediate email, so there's no waiting period.

We send two kinds of email. An evening digest lands each night with a summary of all roadworks due to start on your routes the following day — so you can plan ahead. If new emergency or urgent works are published during the day that affect your routes, we'll send an immediate alert as soon as we see them.

These are works classified by the promoter (the council or utility company) as emergency or immediate-risk in Street Manager. Think burst water mains, gas leaks, or urgent highway repairs. They can appear with very little notice, which is exactly why we send an immediate alert rather than waiting for the evening digest.

We reflect status updates from Street Manager as quickly as we receive them. If works are cancelled or completed before the planned end date, they'll disappear from your dashboard automatically — no stale alerts about things that are already done.

We aim to be genuinely useful, not noisy. The evening digest rolls everything up into a single email, and immediate alerts are reserved for emergency works only. If a quiet week means no works on your routes, you won't hear from us — silence is good news.

Yes. Notification preferences are managed from your dashboard. You can disable the evening digest if you only want immediate alerts for emergencies, or adjust settings per route.

We cover England, where roadworks are reported through the Department for Transport's Street Manager system. Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland use different systems, and we'll add coverage when reliable, high-quality data sources become available.

We match roadworks to your saved route using the actual road IDs (USRNs — Unique Street Reference Numbers) from Street Manager, cross-referenced with the corridor along your route on the map. We also include a small buffer around junctions and bends, so we don't miss works that sit just off your line but would still affect your journey.

We show the latest information published by the promoter in Street Manager. We don't assume a job has started or finished just because a proposed date passes — we wait for the promoter to confirm the actual status. Dates do sometimes slip; when they change, your dashboard and the next digest will reflect the update.

Not yet. Motorway works are managed by National Highways using a separate system, so they don't appear in Street Manager — which means we can't see them. We may add National Highways data in the future, depending on how useful people find it. That said, motorway closures are usually well publicised well in advance. The works that tend to catch people out are the ones on local roads — temporary traffic lights on a B-road, a lane closure through a village, gas works on your usual cut-through. That's exactly where Roadworks Radar is most useful.

It happens occasionally, and there are a few reasons it might. The works could have been an emergency that appeared with no prior notice. The promoter (the council or utility company) might have submitted incomplete or late data to Street Manager — this is more common than you'd think. Or it could simply be something in our system that needs a tweak. Whatever the reason, if you spot something that should have flagged and didn't, please let us know via email or the chat widget. Tell us the road and approximate date and we'll look into it.

This one's on us to be upfront about. Roadworks Radar builds its picture from event notifications sent through Street Manager — things like a permit being granted, work starting, or a status change. If a road closure was already in place before we started receiving data, we may have missed the original notification and have no record of it. This means very long-standing closures — ones that have been there for many months — might not appear, even if they're still very much live. It's a known gap that should close over time as our dataset matures. In the meantime, for closures that have been in place a long time, your local council's website is the most reliable check.

These won't appear in Roadworks Radar. Street Manager only covers works that promoters are legally required to notify — things like digging up the road to lay a cable or fix a pipe. Closures caused by things like flooding, local events, or council decisions made at short notice don't go through the same process, so they're invisible to us. For that kind of disruption, your best bet is your local council's website or their social media channels — they're usually quickest to post about it.

Yes. All roadworks data comes directly from the UK Department for Transport's Street Manager — the official system that councils and utility companies are required to use when notifying about works on public roads. We don't invent, modify, or delay the data.

Yes — completely free. We've just launched and we're in an early-access phase. We want real people using it on real routes before we settle on what a paid plan looks like. So for now, sign up, create your routes, and use everything with no card required.

We plan to introduce a paid plan at some point — but early users will be looked after. We're not going to flip a switch overnight and lock you out. If and when pricing changes, we'll give you plenty of notice and early adopters will get a better deal than anyone signing up later.

Honestly? Because we've only just launched and we want to learn. We'd rather have people actually using Roadworks Radar and telling us what works, what's confusing, and what's missing — than charge for something we haven't fully battle-tested yet. Your feedback right now is worth more to us than a subscription fee.

We'd love to hear from you. Drop us an email at support@roadworksradar.uk or use the chat widget. Tell us what you like, what confused you, what you wish it did. Genuinely — every message gets read.

No. Just your email address (or Google account). There's no card, no trial period to remember to cancel — nothing like that. It's free, and signing up takes about 30 seconds.