CARS-511 Traveler Info Extractor
Pricing
from $0.35 / 1,000 traveler records
CARS-511 Traveler Info Extractor
Point at ANY CARS-511 DOT deployment and extract its traveler-information collections over the public REST API: road events, incidents, construction, traffic cameras, and winter-road conditions. One normalized row per record + the full raw record. Seeded on Ontario & Alberta 511.
Pricing
from $0.35 / 1,000 traveler records
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Datamule
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3 days ago
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Point at any CARS-511 traveler-information deployment and extract its
public collections — road events, incidents, construction, traffic cameras,
and winter-road conditions — over the CARS REST API
(GET /api/v2/get/<collection>?format=json). 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) |
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
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
- Forces
?format=json+Accept: application/jsonand reads the collection as a single JSON array (the CARS get endpoint returns the whole collection at once). - Detects the record id case-insensitively (
IDvsId), maps a normalized common subset, and preserves the full original record underraw. - 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.
