Show HN: Open-source UK fuel availability tracker (opens in new tab)

We're talking about only selling EVs from 2030, but the state of EV chargers, especially in urban areas, is absolutely dire. And there doesn't seem to be enough recognition of that. Take for example the London borough of Haringey. There's 81 publicly accessible EV charging points, and they're making a song and dance about installing a further 37. https://www.haringey.gov.uk/parking-roads-and-travel/travel/...

How many people live in Haringey? 270,000. Housing is predominantly flats and terraced housing. Even if there's only a car for every 4 people, that still means 67,500 EVs.

There needs to be a couple of orders of magnitude more EV chargers to be anywhere close to "ready" for the EV transition.

Probably not exactly what you're looking for but we do have an API for that https://m3o.com/evchargers/api#Search

The national grid is barely keeping up with current demand for electricity, I will be astounded if we manage to pull off anything nearing a reasonable solution to electrifying private vehicles.

With the government imposing a ban on the manufacture of ICE vehicles this decade, we have an upper limit of what, 20 years before ICE vehicles are being run into the ground?

Great for ICE mechanics in the UK I suppose.

My dad recently retired from a team building substations all over the UK, using equipment from a well-respected European vendor, he noted that the contract has now gone to someone else making inferior equipment which he and other retired/semi-retired members of his team have been called back in to help rectify, in part because the skills and experience required exist with a very select few old-guard who've been doing the job for decades.

Aside from that potentially not going well in the log run, I don't see how we can be ready, or even close to ready for electrification of private vehicles unless every parking space in the country becomes a charging point and huge additional power supplies are created.

The Shell garage near my home, in a London borough is so far from anything useful, that if you manage to get one of the 3 electric charging stations there, you're either grabbing an Uber to head somewhere, or waiting in your car until it's charged, how are we going to work around the productivity decline of having to wait hours to charge up?

Don't get me wrong, I would absolutely love to own and drive an EV but it's so impractical that I can't even consider it.

It's an interesting problem that will be entertaining to watch play out, one way or another.

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.

We're a week in, nobody's "panic buying", they're just... buying. People don't - can't - have giant fuel stashes at home. You fill up your tank and that's it, nowhere else to put fuel. There's a limit to how much demand can be explained by people with jerry cans - there simply aren't that many jerry cans around.

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.

>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.

The overriding sentiment right now is isolated shortages have turned into widespread shortages because of panic buying, not actual shortages or HGV driver shortages.

Or provide a fallback for when you don't want to share location - like manual postcode entry

Thanks!

I think I know what is that :) I was grepping for "fuel" in osmconvert csv dump (as in ameniity=fuel)

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 :)

You don't have iOS 15 with the Private Relay enabled, do you?

> 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.

This project is like 8 hours old :)

It really depends on the traction now.

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.

Yes. And project has launched today only.

LOL. I am not collecting location data at all. Not even session data. This is all done on client.