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About Live Roads Canada

What is happening on Canada's roads right now, from the provinces' own 511 services and the cities' open data, on one map, with the source and the time of every event.

What it is

In Canada, road information is public but scattered. Each province runs its own 511 and shows its own highways only; each city publishes its own street closures; Environment and Climate Change Canada publishes the weather warnings. Each in its own format, on its own website, at its own pace.

Live Roads Canada puts them side by side, live, with no sign-up: closures, construction, collisions, winter road conditions, cameras and border waits, highway by highway and province by province. Every event says where it comes from and when it was last updated, on the clock of the place it happened.

Where the data comes from

Every event is read through Roadscore, which queries each source every few minutes, puts them into one format and removes duplicates. Right now that is 5,276 events, as of 3:20 a.m. EST:

SourceEvents nowLatest updateState
City open data (Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary)City of Toronto, City of Vancouver and City of Calgary open data1,8392 min agoLive
Ville de MontréalVille de Montréal, Entraves et travaux en cours (donnees.montreal.ca)6348 hr agoLive
511 Ontario511 Ontario, Ministry of Transportation of Ontario4818 min agoLive
Ville de Québec (WZDx)Ville de Québec (Work Zone Data Exchange)44816 hr agoLive
City of WinnipegContains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Winnipeg3011 day agoLive
Québec 511 (MTMD)Ministère des Transports et de la Mobilité durable du Québec (Québec 511), via Données Québec27717 min agoLive
DriveBCDriveBC, Government of British Columbia2671 hr agoLive
511 Alberta511 Alberta, Government of Alberta (Alberta Transportation and Economic Corridors)17813 min agoLive
City of EdmontonCity of Edmonton Open Data1412 min agoLive
511 Nova Scotia511 Nova Scotia, Province of Nova Scotia1203 days agoLive
New Brunswick 511New Brunswick 511, Government of New Brunswick11611 hr agoLive
Manitoba 511Manitoba 511, Government of Manitoba11313 hr agoLive
511 Yukon511 Yukon, Government of Yukon939 hr agoLive
City of OttawaContains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – City of Ottawa8914 hr agoLive
Environment and Climate Change Canada482 hr agoLive
Saskatchewan Highway HotlineSource: Government of Saskatchewan, Highway Hotline441 day agoLive
NL 511NL 511, Government of Newfoundland and Labrador271 hr agoLive
Edmonton Transit · Calgary Transit (detours)Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – City of Edmonton, and City of Calgary open data246 min agoLive
Halifax (HRM)Contains information licenced under the Open Government Licence – Halifax216 days agoLive
PEI 511PEI 511, Government of Prince Edward Island123 days agoLive
Local news reportReports from Canadian news outlets and RCMP news releases, each credited and linked; facts extracted by Roadscore. Place names from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0); road positions from OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).33 days agoLive

Each source is credited the way it asks, in the footer of every page and on every event. Traffic cameras come from the 511s, and the images stay on their servers. Border waits come from the Canada Border Services Agency and US Customs and Border Protection.

How it works

  • Pages are rebuilt every minute from the latest read. The time at the top of each page is when that read happened.
  • Every time is shown on the clock where the event is, with its zone named: a closure at 10 p.m. on the Coquihalla is 10 p.m. Pacific.
  • “Nothing reported” and “not connected” are never the same thing. Where we don’t read a province’s collisions or winter reports, the page says so; it never shows an empty list as a clear road. A count we can’t vouch for shows a dash, not a zero.
  • Each source is watched on its own. A provincial construction feed that suddenly sends nothing is treated as a feed that stopped, not as a quiet province, and the pages say so until it comes back.
  • A highway counts as fully closed only when the road itself is shut: a closed ramp, a closed lane or a closed rest area is listed with its own label, never counted as a closure.
  • Distances are in kilometres and temperatures in degrees Celsius; Québec’s pages are in Québec French first.

What is missing

Said before you find out. Right now, these layers are not on Live Roads, or not from the province’s own service:

Nunavut has no roads between its communities. British Columbia’s DriveBC cameras are waiting for a licence confirmation. Where a layer is missing, each page links the province’s own 511; the 511 guide lists them all.

What this site is not

  • Not an official service: the provinces’ 511s and the road signs are the authority. Check them before you travel.
  • Not navigation: it says what is on the road, not how to get somewhere.
  • Not an emergency service: in an emergency, call 911.

Who runs it

Live Roads Canada is run by Maurício Amaro, as part of the Roadscore group of road information sites: the same method, one country each, all reading their data through Roadscore:

If you spot an error, if a source we should have is missing, or if you want to reuse this data, write to [email protected]. The data is also available through the public API, and the privacy page says what the site collects.