It's Highway Robbery, innit

[240PP]

Gloucester Services on the M5 showing 142.2p… doesn’t sound right.

Next cheapest is 150.7p

[tim]

I'm liking the updates Tim

Apparently the Murco in Woopit are selling SUL at 149.9p, so I might scout it on my motorbike and get them to chuck in a tenner and return in my car if it really is that cheap

That's 5 mins from my g/f's house, so is my go-to fuel station especially for Diesel. They were always 15p a litre cheaper than Harleston/Diss before this chaos kicked off.

[tim]

Gloucester Services on the M5 showing 142.2p… doesn’t sound right.

Next cheapest is 150.7p

This one? With only 1 fuel pricing entry they've literally just appeared on the system, and it's probably shit data. The deadline for registering and updating prices was months ago. There's still quite a few like this, or who haven't updated their pricing in months.

The gov are going to start cracking down on these people now as the grace period is over.

[tim]

For the first time since all this chaos started, yesterday saw more fuel stations lowering their prices than raising them nationally. There were still only around 500 price changes all day (compared to nearly 6,000 at peak gouging about 3 weeks ago).

I think the next main update will be a separate stats page

https://highwayrobbery.uk

[tim]

Now showing the number of price increases and decreases nationally for each fuel type.

https://highewayrobbery.uk
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61569094131480

[tim]

Version 1.26 out

Now with autocomplete postcode/location search, and a direct link for each searched location/fuel type, so you can bookmark/favourite results directly.

[tim]

Now with a map view!

[jamcg]

Now with a map view!

Map view is great, is there anyway to show a pin of the postcode you entered on the map view? With my own address it’s fine, but I imagine it could be difficult to locate yourself if you’re somewhere unfamiliar

Bunged you a few quid in the donate thingy too, hopefully things like this become really mainstream and lead some price drops

[tim]

That's a good suggestion, I'll see what I can do. Thank you very much for the donation, it is much appreciated.

When you enter a postcode, it's converted to a lat/long so that's simple enough.

When you enter a location, because I don't want to spend £7,500 + VAT on a postcode address file from the RoyalMail, it finds all the retailers with that location in the city name field and finds the average lat/long of each fuel station to work out the center point for the radius to pull in results to. So that pin might appear in a place you didn't quite expect it.

The big issue with location search is the shite data entry mechanism at the government portal end. There is no address validation, so any given location might have a number of spellings, or even combine locations with / separators and all sorts of other junk.

Bury Saint Edmunds
Bury St Edmunds
Bury St. Edmunds

There isn't a simple way that I've figured out to ensure those three as an example appear in the same search, which is frustrating. Postcode is far more reliable as a result, but of course if you're away from home knowing a local postcode isn't super simple.

[mik]

I’ve bunged you a litre of fuel too - please use it wisely

[tim]

I’ve bunged you a litre of fuel too - please use it wisely

Very kind Sir, I shall attempt to wheelie for the entire litre.

[Beany]

Getting a few 403s on the OpenStreetMap parts, something something referrer grumbling!

Screenshot_20260424_133948.png (293.66 KiB) Viewed 165 times

Otherwise, very snazzy!

[tim]

ah nuts, thanks Beanster.

v1.39 is going through CI pipeline and should be updated shortly. Should fix this issue, and also adds a pin to the centre of the search area.

The pin is dropped in the average lat/long of all search results as that's the nearest I can get it quickly. Needs a back end adjustment to send the actual lat/long used by the search back to the UI for the map display so that'll filter through in a day or two.

[PaulJ]

Talking petrol, Esso seems generally cheaper in Derbyshire where I live. It's also claims to be 99 octane when other (more expensive) fuels claim 97 octane. If I don't get 99 octane I feel like I'm buying my car Prosecco when I know that Champagne exits!

[Beany]

Yup, can confirm no more OpenStreetmap errors!

[tim]

Cool. The search location pin is now also in the right place.

[IanF]

Any chance of adding w3w? I use them a lot whilst looking for property and they’re really useful

[tim]

Interesting idea, will investigate.

[jamcg]

Excellent updates

[tim]

So adding w3w will take just over 8 days to populate the database with the 3-word string, due to the stingy rate-limit on the lowest tier developer account, and that's still £9.99/month.

Will implement it when donations exceed that amount!