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.
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.
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
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.
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?!
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
For those not in the UK wondering what this is all about: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/24/what-is-cau...
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.
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.
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.
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?
Where is the data on fuel availability coming from?
Very Sinister, it doesn't allow you to input location. Almost like a location backdoor.
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/...