Slow Drive

Everyone in Edmonton knows a corridor that has been under construction "forever." Nobody publishes the number. Slow Drive works it out: how long each corridor has actually been torn up, how many vehicles pass through it daily, and the estimated commuter hours lost as a result.

It is deliberately, visibly an estimate — the point is to show scale, not to pretend to be an official measurement.

Where the data comes from

Three City of Edmonton open datasets, pulled from the Socrata portal by an ingest script:

• On-street Construction & Maintenance — corridors, dates, restrictions, impact flags
• Average Annual Weekday Traffic Volumes — real daily traffic counts (AADT)
• Edmonton Road Projects — official project descriptions, used to enrich the permit records

Only the vehicle-delay figures are modelled, using a transparent formula that the app shows you. Every other field comes straight from open data.

The interesting problem

The City's feed drops permits once they close — so the portal can only ever tell you about construction happening right now. There is no history.

So the app builds its own. A store accumulates every permit it has ever seen, keyed by file number with firstSeen and lastSeen timestamps. When a permit disappears from the feed and its finish date has passed, it's inferred completed — which reconstructs the closed-project history the portal doesn't retain. A weekly GitHub Action re-runs the ingest and commits the refreshed store back to the repo.

Independent and unofficial — not affiliated with or endorsed by the City of Edmonton. Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – City of Edmonton.