A new map of roadworks in England and Wales is launched today. Could this be the extra information you need to plan a journey seamlessly?

With the plethora of maps available these days you would think every journey could be planned perfectly. But when you're planning a route the maps rarely, if ever, take into account roadworks. That is up until today, when an interactive map of all the roadworks in England and Wales is launched.

At the moment it has about 1.7 million local road works and it's updated "up-to-the-minute" acording to the founders.

Click on the image or this link to view the full map of roadworks by Elgin

Roadworks Alerts is free to users and the details of your local road

works can be sent to mobile phones or as automated feeds to websites if you set up an alert for your area.

The company that brings you these maps, ELGIN, states that it exists because of the Government's vision of opening up local transport data by December 2012.

ELGIN collects data from a variety of sources: real-time roadworks and incidents updates for the motorways are received from the National Traffic Control Centre and works information on other major routes comes from the Highways Agency. Outside of London the vast majority of information is harvested directly from local authority streetworks registers, which contain up-to-date information on all current and planned roadworks. Within the Greater London area data updates are received from Transport for London's roadworks database, LondonWorks.

At present roadworks.org covers 60% of England and Wales. ELGIN are appealing to all local authorities (LAs) who are not yet publishing local roadworks information on the website to join the initiative. LAs can participate in the basic service for free and ELGIN is adding a range of value added services for those who wish to use the system to improve coordination and reduce congestion.

What would you do with this data and what do you think to these maps?

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