8 ms·

Show HN: Open-source UK fuel availability tracker

38 points by sztanko 5y ago

lanevorockz 5y ago
Very Sinister, it doesn't allow you to input location. Almost like a location backdoor.
- sztanko 5y ago
  LOL. I am not collecting location data at all. Not even session data. This is all done on client.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
revorad 5y ago
Great idea! On iPhone Safari it’s not detecting my location. Is it supposed to prompt me to share the location? I don’t get anything. Update: Nevermind, it works once I enabled location sharing in my privacy settings. I will share this with others. As per another comment, it would be good if we could search or choose a location.
- Angostura 5y ago
  You don't have iOS 15 with the Private Relay enabled, do you?
- sztanko 5y ago
  I agree it would be great to chose the location and I will try to come up with some solution. Essentially, the main challenge here is that this is 99% statically hosted project. You download the full list of fuel stations and the app then shows you the closes ones. We have around 7k fuel stations across the UK, which is 350kb compressed, so not a big issue. However, full postcode list (1,768,727 postcodes) is 20MB compressed (62MB uncompressed), that won't be acceptable to be handled on the client device. I am thinking of cutting off the last two characters off postcode, that will give us 11k rows and 286kb with around 1 mile precision in densely populated areas, that will do the trick. In any case, I only started working on it on Sunday. Still have couple of ideas to implement, but need to do my day to day work :)
trollied 5y ago
For those not in the UK wondering what this is all about: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/24/what-is-causing-the-uk-crisis-in-petrol-supplies https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/24/what-is-cau...
- veltas 5y ago
  The overriding sentiment right now is isolated shortages have turned into widespread shortages because of panic buying, not actual shortages or HGV driver shortages.
  - ralphael 5y ago
    ...actually, its people who did not fill up last week and now have no choice.
  - danjac 5y ago
    That's not what news reports say outside the tame media of the UK's "managed democracy". https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/opinion/britain-fuel-crisis-johnson.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/opinion/britain-fuel-cris...
    - neilsense 5y ago
      Ah, yes, the NYT, for when you really want the truth...
      - danjac 5y ago
        The NYT does not have an axe to grind with Brexit, an issue for a foreign country. Even when it does have an axe to grind, it's default flex is "to both sides" an issue to the point of parody. Yet even the NYT can see the elephant in the room the UK media refuses to address. Don't trust the NYT? https://www.vox.com/22700343/uk-fuel-crisis-brexit-covid-19-european-union https://www.vox.com/22700343/uk-fuel-crisis-brexit-covid-19-... https://edition.cnn.com/2021/09/28/business/brexit-fuel-food-shortages/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2021/09/28/business/brexit-fuel-food... https://www.indiatoday.in/business/story/uk-fuel-crisis-chaos-at-gas-stations-petrol-pumps-explained-1858208-2021-09-28 https://www.indiatoday.in/business/story/uk-fuel-crisis-chao...
mobiuscog 5y ago
Whilst I applaud the sentiment, this demonstrates one of the flaws with crowdsourced data (I presume). The result list for me (that goes as far as 7.5 miles away) shows 'unknown' for every garage, which therefore renders the list useless. No doubt it would improve as more users offered up information, but unless there is a way to automate the data the majority of more rural areas (perhaps even anywhere that is not a large city centre) will never find any use for this.
- Angostura 5y ago
  > No doubt it would improve as more users offered up information, but unless there is a way to automate the data the majority of more rural areas (perhaps even anywhere that is not a large city centre) will never find any use for this. reply I disagree - I uploaded a simple shared spreadsheet to our neighbourhood Facebook page last week. When I added it, it had 20 garages - all unknown, other than 1 - which I filled in. A week later it is getting a lot of use.
- sztanko 5y ago
  This project is like 8 hours old :) It really depends on the traction now.
sztanko 5y ago
While not my most sophisticated project from technology perspective, it works, and is high-load proof. It is almost entirely depends on github pages and actions, with a single exception being an AWS lambda which logs submitted data into Cloudwatch (which is the later collected by a cron github action). Source code here: "https://github.com/sztanko/fuelfinder https://github.com/sztanko/fuelfinder
lol768 5y ago
Suggestion: allow override of the geolocation-derived search epicentre, it's not always (read: has never been reliable for me, unless I'm using a device with a GPS chip). I do appreciate that's the primary aim for this project, rather than desktop, though. Also, perhaps display where it thinks you are too, so you can determine if it's massively off.
- smcl 5y ago
  Or provide a fallback for when you don't want to share location - like manual postcode entry
  - 12ian34 5y ago
    Agree. I think this should be the default option.
  - quickthrower2 5y ago
    I agree. I wanted to check using curiosity but I’m not in the UK so the site does nothing. That said I do like defaults and fewer settings etc.
buro9 5y ago
The fuel crisis in the UK has been great at being EV advocates out of the woodwork, but our infrastructure for charging cars is appalling and as I cycled I rather smugly saw queues at the ev chargers too. But something like this for EVs that also shows the cost of charging would be great. Yes I know about zap map, etc... But in my area the choices are poor, the availability difficult to discover (rate limited and polling for status of chargers?), but mostly the payment is a nightmare with opaque pricing across wild and sometimes exorbitant ranges that seems difficult to discover. Would love to see this tool for EV chargers but with prices, public access, filterable, and centred on my location.
- intricatedetail 5y ago
  Without a network of nuclear power plants I fear the EV revolution will not come to fruition. The government seem to have jumped on the bandwagon without thinking it through.
  - mavhc 5y ago
    Average USA electricity usage per capita: 12 MWh Average distance driven: 14300 miles Assume 4 miles/kwh, that's 3.5 MWh extra (although only 70% of people in USA are drivers)
  - onethought 5y ago
    Standard outlet can add about 2kw/h so Rooftop solar cam more then cover most use cases if charging.
- asim 5y ago
  Probably not exactly what you're looking for but we do have an API for that https://m3o.com/evchargers/api#Search https://m3o.com/evchargers/api#Search
  - buro9 5y ago
    Not far from what I'm looking for! Just needs: * Is it publicly accessible, and if restrictions exist based on time what times is it accessible (i.e. chargers in car parks that aren't open 24/7) * Can members of the public PAYG with no membership required? If so at what rate? And is this via contactless or requires a specific app? * Is it free right now and known to be in working order? Some of this you've covered... but there is no single view of this I can find, and things like Zap Map are partial and have some incorrect data (it's not unusual to be caught out by opening hours of a car park for example).
thinkingemote 5y ago
Nice idea. I get my info from the local facebook group, which seems to have a thread in the morning and evening. A couple of thoughts: 1) I live in the middle of a number of ESSO stations, it's hard to know which one it is, based on a distance, and I dont want to click through to directions. Local facebook group users just give the neighbourhood it's in. 2) The information is very time sensitive, you could order results based on recent update, or availability, instead of closeness or perhaps just emphasise that the update was a long time ago etc. Related to that, try for the time info a bit easier to grasp. 1334m, 23 hours, a day ago, etc Related to that, the majority of stations information are about a day old, but the results say it was updated 10 mins ago. This results update time information doesnt mean as much as the freshness from a station. going back to the facebook group, there is a kind of social network reward for contributing and updating others.
- sztanko 5y ago
  Thanks, these are great ideas. Names and locations of fuel stations are coming from openstreetmap, and it most cases it doesn't have good addresses. I will add ability to edit locations and addresses of the fuel stations when submitting the updates. Eventually this could be added back to OSM. Information here is fully crowdsourced, and the project is around 8 hours old. The more people contribute, the better it gets.
12ian34 5y ago
This is great but I feel like it's more important to educate people not to panic-buy fuel since that's adding a significant strain to the problem (thanks to the media). If people filled up when they normally would have the problem wouldn't have been so huge. Also, why do I have to share my location? What happened to the good old days of just being able to enter postcode or town?!
- Aeolun 5y ago
  If everyone is panic buying, the only solution to your own fuel problems is to buy as well. This is ultimately worse for society, but the only rational response as a single actor.
  - 12ian34 5y ago
    Surely there's another (partial) solution - reduce your own demand for fuel. Cars are generally overused in western countries which I think is one factor in the obesity pandemic.
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      That's an idealistic sentiment, but the fact is that some people have no alternative to car ownership. They either live in the middle of nowhere, or their job is very hard to impossible to get to without a car, or they have poor transport links. Ultimately, for some it's about survival and the inability to work from home.
      - 12ian34 5y ago
        "Some" - but importantly - not "all"
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  >it's more important to educate people not to panic-buy fuel since that's adding a significant strain to the problem I wonder how true this actually is, certainly a useful narrative for the government. But surely, if fuel supply at point of sale is down 30%, there is 30% less fuel, no matter how you dress it. There were isolated reports of people bringing jerry cans to petrol stations, and I agree this is artificially inflating demand, but I'm not sure this is very widespread.
jamesfmilne 5y ago
Might need to work on your heuristics for finding petrol stations a little bit. The site suggested Refuel near me in Soho, London but that’s a bar/restaurant :-) https://www.firmdalehotels.com/hotels/london/the-soho-hotel/refuel-bar-restaurant/ https://www.firmdalehotels.com/hotels/london/the-soho-hotel/...
- sztanko 5y ago
  Thanks! I think I know what is that :) I was grepping for "fuel" in osmconvert csv dump (as in ameniity=fuel)
  - 12ian34 5y ago
    I've used Addressbase a LOT before and they're separating out the core[0] of it to give it a more permissive license[1]. It has the Classification Code attribute which has an identifier for the kind of property you're looking for[2]. Not sure on the licensing details for this but I think your use could be accepted. This could work as a more established alternative from the true golden source of property records in the UK - if you ever fancy switching over. [0]: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/products/addressbase-core https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/product... [1]: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/access-free-address-data-using-addressbase https://www.gov.uk/guidance/access-free-address-data-using-a... [2]: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/tools-support/addressbase-premium-support https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/tools-s...
    - sztanko 5y ago
      Thank you! Will have a look.
alexellisuk 5y ago
I'm seeing "Don't know" for fuel status for everything in the city where I live. I guess this is really relying on crowd-sourcing the data?
- sztanko 5y ago
  Yes. And project has launched today only.
ChrisRR 5y ago
It would be helpful if you could just search by postcode, by phone doesn't want to allow GPS on your site for some reason
illwrks 5y ago
For anyone else, my suggestion: 1. Open google maps 2. Turn on 'live traffic' congestion layer. 3. Identify your local petrol stations. 4. Find one with low congestion, avoid the ones with high congestion. 5. Click on the marker on google maps, 6. Check the 'busyness' indicator. Observations: If it's not busy and there's no congestion it's probably not got any fuel. If it's as busy as usual or even a little bit more than normal, and congestion is not insane then head there. If it's very congested avoid as it's probably being swarmed by social media promotion.
spuz 5y ago
Where is the data on fuel availability coming from?

38 points by sztanko 5y ago

lanevorockz 5y ago

Very Sinister, it doesn't allow you to input location. Almost like a location backdoor.

sztanko 5y ago
LOL. I am not collecting location data at all. Not even session data. This is all done on client.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

revorad 5y ago

Great idea! On iPhone Safari it’s not detecting my location. Is it supposed to prompt me to share the location? I don’t get anything. Update: Nevermind, it works once I enabled location sharing in my privacy settings. I will share this with others. As per another comment, it would be good if we could search or choose a location.

Angostura 5y ago
You don't have iOS 15 with the Private Relay enabled, do you?
sztanko 5y ago
I agree it would be great to chose the location and I will try to come up with some solution. Essentially, the main challenge here is that this is 99% statically hosted project. You download the full list of fuel stations and the app then shows you the closes ones. We have around 7k fuel stations across the UK, which is 350kb compressed, so not a big issue. However, full postcode list (1,768,727 postcodes) is 20MB compressed (62MB uncompressed), that won't be acceptable to be handled on the client device. I am thinking of cutting off the last two characters off postcode, that will give us 11k rows and 286kb with around 1 mile precision in densely populated areas, that will do the trick. In any case, I only started working on it on Sunday. Still have couple of ideas to implement, but need to do my day to day work :)

trollied 5y ago

For those not in the UK wondering what this is all about: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/24/what-is-causing-the-uk-crisis-in-petrol-supplies https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/24/what-is-cau...

veltas 5y ago
The overriding sentiment right now is isolated shortages have turned into widespread shortages because of panic buying, not actual shortages or HGV driver shortages.
- ralphael 5y ago
  ...actually, its people who did not fill up last week and now have no choice.
- danjac 5y ago
  That's not what news reports say outside the tame media of the UK's "managed democracy". https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/opinion/britain-fuel-crisis-johnson.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/opinion/britain-fuel-cris...
  - neilsense 5y ago
    Ah, yes, the NYT, for when you really want the truth...
    - danjac 5y ago
      The NYT does not have an axe to grind with Brexit, an issue for a foreign country. Even when it does have an axe to grind, it's default flex is "to both sides" an issue to the point of parody. Yet even the NYT can see the elephant in the room the UK media refuses to address. Don't trust the NYT? https://www.vox.com/22700343/uk-fuel-crisis-brexit-covid-19-european-union https://www.vox.com/22700343/uk-fuel-crisis-brexit-covid-19-... https://edition.cnn.com/2021/09/28/business/brexit-fuel-food-shortages/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2021/09/28/business/brexit-fuel-food... https://www.indiatoday.in/business/story/uk-fuel-crisis-chaos-at-gas-stations-petrol-pumps-explained-1858208-2021-09-28 https://www.indiatoday.in/business/story/uk-fuel-crisis-chao...

mobiuscog 5y ago

Whilst I applaud the sentiment, this demonstrates one of the flaws with crowdsourced data (I presume). The result list for me (that goes as far as 7.5 miles away) shows 'unknown' for every garage, which therefore renders the list useless. No doubt it would improve as more users offered up information, but unless there is a way to automate the data the majority of more rural areas (perhaps even anywhere that is not a large city centre) will never find any use for this.

Angostura 5y ago
> No doubt it would improve as more users offered up information, but unless there is a way to automate the data the majority of more rural areas (perhaps even anywhere that is not a large city centre) will never find any use for this. reply I disagree - I uploaded a simple shared spreadsheet to our neighbourhood Facebook page last week. When I added it, it had 20 garages - all unknown, other than 1 - which I filled in. A week later it is getting a lot of use.
sztanko 5y ago
This project is like 8 hours old :) It really depends on the traction now.

sztanko 5y ago

While not my most sophisticated project from technology perspective, it works, and is high-load proof. It is almost entirely depends on github pages and actions, with a single exception being an AWS lambda which logs submitted data into Cloudwatch (which is the later collected by a cron github action). Source code here: "https://github.com/sztanko/fuelfinder https://github.com/sztanko/fuelfinder

lol768 5y ago

Suggestion: allow override of the geolocation-derived search epicentre, it's not always (read: has never been reliable for me, unless I'm using a device with a GPS chip). I do appreciate that's the primary aim for this project, rather than desktop, though. Also, perhaps display where it thinks you are too, so you can determine if it's massively off.

smcl 5y ago
Or provide a fallback for when you don't want to share location - like manual postcode entry
- 12ian34 5y ago
  Agree. I think this should be the default option.
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  I agree. I wanted to check using curiosity but I’m not in the UK so the site does nothing. That said I do like defaults and fewer settings etc.

buro9 5y ago

The fuel crisis in the UK has been great at being EV advocates out of the woodwork, but our infrastructure for charging cars is appalling and as I cycled I rather smugly saw queues at the ev chargers too. But something like this for EVs that also shows the cost of charging would be great. Yes I know about zap map, etc... But in my area the choices are poor, the availability difficult to discover (rate limited and polling for status of chargers?), but mostly the payment is a nightmare with opaque pricing across wild and sometimes exorbitant ranges that seems difficult to discover. Would love to see this tool for EV chargers but with prices, public access, filterable, and centred on my location.

intricatedetail 5y ago
Without a network of nuclear power plants I fear the EV revolution will not come to fruition. The government seem to have jumped on the bandwagon without thinking it through.
- mavhc 5y ago
  Average USA electricity usage per capita: 12 MWh Average distance driven: 14300 miles Assume 4 miles/kwh, that's 3.5 MWh extra (although only 70% of people in USA are drivers)
- onethought 5y ago
  Standard outlet can add about 2kw/h so Rooftop solar cam more then cover most use cases if charging.
asim 5y ago
Probably not exactly what you're looking for but we do have an API for that https://m3o.com/evchargers/api#Search https://m3o.com/evchargers/api#Search
- buro9 5y ago
  Not far from what I'm looking for! Just needs: * Is it publicly accessible, and if restrictions exist based on time what times is it accessible (i.e. chargers in car parks that aren't open 24/7) * Can members of the public PAYG with no membership required? If so at what rate? And is this via contactless or requires a specific app? * Is it free right now and known to be in working order? Some of this you've covered... but there is no single view of this I can find, and things like Zap Map are partial and have some incorrect data (it's not unusual to be caught out by opening hours of a car park for example).

thinkingemote 5y ago

Nice idea. I get my info from the local facebook group, which seems to have a thread in the morning and evening. A couple of thoughts: 1) I live in the middle of a number of ESSO stations, it's hard to know which one it is, based on a distance, and I dont want to click through to directions. Local facebook group users just give the neighbourhood it's in. 2) The information is very time sensitive, you could order results based on recent update, or availability, instead of closeness or perhaps just emphasise that the update was a long time ago etc. Related to that, try for the time info a bit easier to grasp. 1334m, 23 hours, a day ago, etc Related to that, the majority of stations information are about a day old, but the results say it was updated 10 mins ago. This results update time information doesnt mean as much as the freshness from a station. going back to the facebook group, there is a kind of social network reward for contributing and updating others.

sztanko 5y ago
Thanks, these are great ideas. Names and locations of fuel stations are coming from openstreetmap, and it most cases it doesn't have good addresses. I will add ability to edit locations and addresses of the fuel stations when submitting the updates. Eventually this could be added back to OSM. Information here is fully crowdsourced, and the project is around 8 hours old. The more people contribute, the better it gets.

12ian34 5y ago

This is great but I feel like it's more important to educate people not to panic-buy fuel since that's adding a significant strain to the problem (thanks to the media). If people filled up when they normally would have the problem wouldn't have been so huge. Also, why do I have to share my location? What happened to the good old days of just being able to enter postcode or town?!

Aeolun 5y ago
If everyone is panic buying, the only solution to your own fuel problems is to buy as well. This is ultimately worse for society, but the only rational response as a single actor.
- 12ian34 5y ago
  Surely there's another (partial) solution - reduce your own demand for fuel. Cars are generally overused in western countries which I think is one factor in the obesity pandemic.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    That's an idealistic sentiment, but the fact is that some people have no alternative to car ownership. They either live in the middle of nowhere, or their job is very hard to impossible to get to without a car, or they have poor transport links. Ultimately, for some it's about survival and the inability to work from home.
    - 12ian34 5y ago
      "Some" - but importantly - not "all"
rich_sasha 5y ago
>it's more important to educate people not to panic-buy fuel since that's adding a significant strain to the problem I wonder how true this actually is, certainly a useful narrative for the government. But surely, if fuel supply at point of sale is down 30%, there is 30% less fuel, no matter how you dress it. There were isolated reports of people bringing jerry cans to petrol stations, and I agree this is artificially inflating demand, but I'm not sure this is very widespread.

jamesfmilne 5y ago

Might need to work on your heuristics for finding petrol stations a little bit. The site suggested Refuel near me in Soho, London but that’s a bar/restaurant :-) https://www.firmdalehotels.com/hotels/london/the-soho-hotel/refuel-bar-restaurant/ https://www.firmdalehotels.com/hotels/london/the-soho-hotel/...

sztanko 5y ago
Thanks! I think I know what is that :) I was grepping for "fuel" in osmconvert csv dump (as in ameniity=fuel)
- 12ian34 5y ago
  I've used Addressbase a LOT before and they're separating out the core[0] of it to give it a more permissive license[1]. It has the Classification Code attribute which has an identifier for the kind of property you're looking for[2]. Not sure on the licensing details for this but I think your use could be accepted. This could work as a more established alternative from the true golden source of property records in the UK - if you ever fancy switching over. [0]: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/products/addressbase-core https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/product... [1]: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/access-free-address-data-using-addressbase https://www.gov.uk/guidance/access-free-address-data-using-a... [2]: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/tools-support/addressbase-premium-support https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/tools-s...
  - sztanko 5y ago
    Thank you! Will have a look.

alexellisuk 5y ago

I'm seeing "Don't know" for fuel status for everything in the city where I live. I guess this is really relying on crowd-sourcing the data?

sztanko 5y ago
Yes. And project has launched today only.

ChrisRR 5y ago

It would be helpful if you could just search by postcode, by phone doesn't want to allow GPS on your site for some reason

illwrks 5y ago

For anyone else, my suggestion: 1. Open google maps 2. Turn on 'live traffic' congestion layer. 3. Identify your local petrol stations. 4. Find one with low congestion, avoid the ones with high congestion. 5. Click on the marker on google maps, 6. Check the 'busyness' indicator. Observations: If it's not busy and there's no congestion it's probably not got any fuel. If it's as busy as usual or even a little bit more than normal, and congestion is not insane then head there. If it's very congested avoid as it's probably being swarmed by social media promotion.

spuz 5y ago

Where is the data on fuel availability coming from?