For the past year or so I have been using a couple of websites to get realtime traffic information on my commute up to Staines and back. The Highways Agency have a number of websites all with very non-Highways Agency names!

 

To start off with someone sent me a link to "traffic england"

 

This allow you to focus on a particular segment of the motorway and will show you where the delays are and what roadworks are going on and also you can look at all the information boards on the motorway (that say things like "Queue after Junction" etc.

 

This amused me for some time. Mostly because of the inaccuracy and inconsistency of the information they were displaying. Quite amusing in the middle of the day to find several information boards showing "fog" and the like. Or showing accidents that had been cleared hours ago. Also where there are delays they show you the cause and a "Normal traffic conditions expected at" time. They always seem to say that the problem will be resolved within an hour or so but just before the deadline arrives they extend it an hour. So just approaching rush hour on a Friday afternoon there will be a 40 minute delay at 3pm and they have a message "Normal traffic conditions expected at 4pm". Yeah right!

 

It got so bad that I stopped believing it. But then by accident I stumbled across another Highways Agency website:

 

And this one is good! It only shows the M25 but it shows the *actual* speeds that cars are travelling between junctions. I use this one all the time. If there are particular congestion points I'll then use the Traffic England site to see what the underlying problem is, although you have to make your own assessment of when it's likely to return to normal

 

Why the Highways Agency don't promote these website I don't know. And why they have such inconsistent and unbranded names I don't understand either. But the Realtime Traffic webstie is great so I can't knock it too much!