New on EVH: Roadwork Alerts

There's a new tracker on the Hub. Roadworks in E20 shows every street works permit within a kilometre and a half of East Village — what's being dug up, who's doing it, when it's meant to finish, and whether it already should have.

You'll find it in the Apps section of the website.

What you get

• A three-week calendar — a week back, a fortnight forward. Bars rather than a list, because the two questions residents ask are "is my street dug up now" and "when does it stop", and only position and length answer those.
• A map of where the works are, so you can see whether one is on your way to the station, or on the road you use when heading in or out of EV.
• Three numbers: works underway, works starting this week, and works past their permit.

The part I'm most pleased about: overruns

Every permit carries an end date the highway authority agreed to. When works are still open past that date, they've overrun — and the company digging up the street can be charged for it.

That date is in the national register, but nobody local surfaces it, so an overrun mostly just... continues. The tracker marks those works in red on the calendar and says in plain words how many days past their permit they are. It's the one thing in this data you can actually do something about, and it's the only thing that turns the tracker's verdict amber. The mere existence of a permit never does — something is permitted near E20 most weeks, and a warning that's always on isn't really a warning.

What a permit actually is

Anyone digging up an adopted road needs one from the highway authority, with a start date and an end date. Street Manager is the Department for Transport's national register of them.

If your street isn't on there

Unadopted roads have no highway authority, so no permit exists and nothing shows up. On our estate that's a live question rather than a technicality: if something is being dug up on a street with no permit, the works are likely the estate management company's responsibility rather than the council's. Worth knowing before you spend a morning reporting it to the wrong people.

It won't shout at you

Roadworks only reach the "Heads up" section on the homepage for three things: works that have overrun, a full road closure starting within the week, or a lane closure starting within the week on one of the main routes out of the estate. Footway works, a new fibre permit, a lane closure on a side street — those stay on the tracker, where you go to look rather than being interrupted.

Where the data comes from

Straight from the Department for Transport's Street Manager feed, under the Open Government Licence. It's a live subscription rather than an overnight sync, so a permit appears here within seconds of the roadworks company filing it.

Two honest limits worth knowing about. It only holds works a highway authority has permitted — emergency works can begin before the paperwork is filed, and works on private or unadopted land never appear at all. And a handful of permits don't say where the works are; those are listed on the calendar but can't be drawn on the map, and the page tells you when that's happened rather than quietly showing you a thinner map.

If something's wrong, missing, or just confusing, please do let me know — same as always!