CARS-511 Traveler Info Extractor

Point at any CARS-511 traveler-information deployment and extract its public collections — road events, incidents, construction, traffic cameras, and winter-road conditions — from the host's public website list feed (/List/GetData/<layer>) — no key needed — or the /api/v2/get/<collection> developer API when you supply an optional apiKey (most CARS/IBI hosts now reject that API without a key). One normalized row per record, plus the full original record preserved under raw.

CARS (Castle Rock Advanced Traveler Information System, the "511" platform) backs many US-state and Canadian-province traveler-info sites, and they share the same REST contract — so one actor reads any deployment that publishes its collections as JSON. Verified live against Ontario (https://511on.ca) and Alberta (https://511.alberta.ca).

What you get

One normalized row per record, keyed on the always-present id, with a best-effort common subset mapped from whatever the collection provides and the complete original record kept verbatim under raw (so no field is ever lost across the divergent per-authority / per-collection shapes):

Field	Description
id	Record ID — always present, the row key (ID on events, Id on cameras/winterroads)
roadwayName	Road / highway name (nullable)
description	Event description / location description (nullable)
severity	Severity, where the collection provides it (nullable)
eventType / eventSubType	Event classification (nullable)
direction	Direction of travel (nullable)
organization	Reporting organization / camera source (nullable)
location	Location text / area name (nullable)
condition	Road-surface condition, for winter roads (nullable)
isFullClosure	Full-closure flag, for events (nullable)
lanesAffected	Lanes affected text (nullable)
latitude / longitude	Coordinates, where present (nullable — winter-road segments carry none)
reported / startDate / plannedEndDate / lastUpdated	Unix epoch timestamps (nullable; filled only when the host returns epoch or ISO-8601 times, i.e. the legacy v2 API)
startDateText / plannedEndDateText / lastUpdatedText	The date text exactly as the public 511 site shows it (e.g. 6/2/25, 9:00 AM, or 26-9-28 6:54 AM on 511on.ca). It is the host's local time and the site gives no timezone, so it is passed through unchanged, not converted (nullable)
imageUrls	Camera view URLs, for the cameras collection (nullable)
raw	The complete original CARS record, verbatim
_baseUrl / _collection / _page / _rowIndex	Provenance

Input

Field	Required	Description
baseUrl	✅	511 / CARS base URL, e.g. https://511on.ca or https://511.alberta.ca
collection		event (default) · cameras · roadwork · winterroads · signs · ferries
maxRecords		Stop after N records (default 2000)

Per-authority coverage

The CARS collections a site serves vary by authority. event and cameras have the widest coverage; roadwork / winterroads / signs / ferries are published by some authorities only (e.g. Alberta publishes winterroads; Ontario publishes event + cameras). A collection a host does not serve returns HTTP 404, and this actor fails fast for that run rather than emitting an empty result.

Example

{
  "baseUrl": "https://511on.ca",
  "collection": "event",
  "maxRecords": 200
}

Use cases

• Logistics & fleet routing — live road closures, construction, and incidents along a corridor.
• Road-risk analysis — winter-road conditions and full-closure flags for routing and safety models.
• Traffic-camera indexing — camera locations and their live image-view URLs.
• Traveler-info dashboards — a normalized feed of a region's 511 events.

How it works

• Without apiKey, pages the public list feed (100 per page) up to maxRecords; with apiKey, reads /api/v2/get/<collection>?format=json and falls back to the list feed if the key is rejected.
• Detects the record id case-insensitively (ID vs Id), maps a normalized common subset, and preserves the full original record under raw.
• Fails fast — never a fabricated empty success — if the base URL is unreachable, serves HTML instead of JSON (a 511 site without a JSON API), 404s the requested collection, returns a non-array body, or the collection returned zero records.

Pricing

Pay-per-event: $0.0005 per record (tiered volume discount by subscription tier). You pay only for records actually emitted.

Maximum charge per run

Each record is billed in the same step that writes it to the dataset, so you pay only for records you receive. If you set a maximum total charge on the run, the Actor checks it before contacting the 511 host and before every further page request; it stops when one more record would not be affordable (a budget below one record makes no request at all). maxRecords is a strict cap. A billing error stops the run with an error instead of delivering unbilled records. If the platform restarts a run, records already delivered are skipped, never written or billed twice.