Next Week’s Roadworks Are Already Published. Mostly by Three Countries.

A transport planner booking a night run from Rotterdam to the Ruhr for next Tuesday has one question about the road: will it be open when we get there? A live traffic feed cannot answer it. It describes the road now. The answer lives in a different register — the roadworks an authority has already scheduled and published, days or months before the first cone goes down.

We carry 63,520 active roadworks records across 19 European countries. 18,264 of them start in the future. And 18,130 of those — 99.3% — come from three countries: the Netherlands, Germany and Austria.

One Call, Next Week, Both Sides of the Border

The A12 becomes the A3 at the Dutch–German border near Zevenaar. Ask for every roadworks record within 30 km of it that starts in a given window:

curl -H "X-API-Key: $KEY" \
  "https://api.napspan.com/api/v1/events?type=construction&status=active&lat=51.88&lng=6.13&radius_km=30&start_time_from=2026-10-27T00:00:00Z&start_time_to=2026-11-05T00:00:00Z"

start_time_from and start_time_to filter on the start the authority published, on every plan; reaching more than seven days into the past is what needs an analytics plan, not looking ahead. Pass status=active explicitly — with a time range and no status, the endpoint includes archived records.

Measured on 22 October, the same circle over the next fourteen days held 288 planned roadworks and closure records — 283 Dutch, 5 German. That split is not a statement about the two road networks. It is a statement about what each side publishes, and it is the subject of the rest of this post.

Who Publishes the Future

Every figure below is from one transaction against production on 22 October 2026, 07:23 UTC:

Read the lower half as carefully as the upper. Sweden publishes 3,737 roadworks and not one with a future start; Italy, Estonia and Spain likewise. That does not mean nothing is planned there. It means those feeds describe the road as it is today, and a planner working a Swedish corridor next week gets no warning from them until the works begin.

How Far Ahead

Of the 18,264 forward records, 5,410 start within seven days, 7,549 between one week and a month out, 2,244 between one and three months, and 3,061 more than three months ahead. The furthest-out start in the set is a German record dated February 2034, and a Dutch one is dated June 2031. Read anything beyond a year as an authority’s intention, not a schedule.

Most of what is coming is short. Of the forward records that carry an end time, 6,811 last under a day — overnight closures, the kind that decide a night run — 4,077 last up to a week, 3,761 up to a month, 2,633 up to six months, and 778 longer than that.

On the Route

A planned roadwork on a route comes back from POST /routing/route as a warning carrying valid_from and valid_to next to the projected_arrival_time for that point. A record whose end time is before your arrival is dropped. A record that starts after you pass is not dropped — it is returned with its valid_from, so you can decide whether a closure starting at 22:00 matters to a truck arriving at 21:40. Compare the two fields; do not read the warning alone as “closed when you get there”.

What the Records Will Not Tell You

A record is not a roadwork. The Dutch planning feed sends one record per traffic measure: the closure, each lane restriction and, for Rijkswaterstaat works, each signed detour leg. Its 13,162 forward records describe about 8,400 distinct works, and 2,785 of them are detour legs. Across the whole set, collapsing records at the same place with the same times leaves about 15,800 of 18,264. We publish them as the authorities send them; we do not merge.

Dutch records carry no road number. Not one of the 13,162 has a structured road name; where the street is given, it is inside the free-text description (“050 Rijksweg 50 …”, “Bedrijvenweg Doetinchem …”). The feed does name a road in a structured field — but it is the detour road, not the one being closed, so we leave it out of affected_roads rather than send a truck the wrong way. Query the Netherlands by place — bbox or radius_km — not by road.

Some works never say when they end, and some outlive their end. 9,293 of the 63,520 active records carry no end time — among them every record from Italy, Estonia and Norway. And 3,219 are still published after the end time they state (Germany 1,664, the Netherlands 1,374, Austria 138). The route warning drops those for you; the list endpoint shows what the authority still publishes, so filter on end_time if you want only works that are still meant to be running.

Germany is published twice, a little. The national Autobahn feed and the state feeds overlap: 99 of the 1,737 federal forward records arrive again from a state feed under the same identifier. It is a small share and it is real.

What This Does Not Do

• It does not plan works that nobody published. Ten countries publish any future start at all; three publish nearly all of it.
• It does not guarantee the dates. A published start is the authority’s plan on the day it was published. Schedules move; poll again closer to the run.
• It does not de-duplicate. Count works by place and time, not by records.
• It does not read the free text for you. Dutch street names stay in description.

All figures measured against production on 22 October 2026, 07:23–07:30 UTC. Counts move every poll; the shape — three countries publishing nearly all of Europe’s forward roadworks — is the finding.

Try It

• API docs — /events with type=construction, start_time_from/start_time_to, bbox or radius_km
• Truck restrictions and VMS across borders — the other half of planning a cross-border run
• Free API key — no card, 14-day trial