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).
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.
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 :)
The overriding sentiment right now is isolated shortages have turned into widespread shortages because of panic buying, not actual shortages or HGV driver shortages.
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.
The New York Times has consistently awful UK coverage. And it certainly has an anti-Tory Remainer bias. Personally, I think the shortage is related to Brexit, and it's a short-term consequence of not being able to import cheap foreign labour instead of paying reasonable wages. We do have a driver shortage because haulage firms don't want to pay drivers a competitive salary. Plus, COVID disrupted driver testing and the issuing of new licenses. Plus, some in the media over-egged the problem and created panic buying. It's a multi-cause issue.
And so does reality. Brexit, recent Tory governments are mismanaged unmitigated disasters. Is there anything broadly positive that can be said of them? Vaccination was decently managed, that's for sure.
What do you expect me to say in response? You've stated that your opinion is the only realistic appraisal of the situation. That implies we don't merely disagree in our intepretation of events, but that you understand reality and I am deluded. We can't have a polite disagreement among equals because "reality" is on your side and not mine. Why would I bother to talk to someone who thinks like that?
I'm not trying to convince you, i'm merely stating that it's incredibly hard to look at the Tories and Brexit and come out with positive things to say. If that doesn't match your opinion, i highly doubt you'd reconsider based on an online discussion. Anyone who can overlook everything they've failed at ( be it on a diplomatic, personal or whatever level) - just the corrupt crony contracts they gave for the emergency Brexit ferries or NHS emergency supplies at the beginning at the pandemic and their violation of just signed international agreements by them would be game over for me - either sees things very differently ( e.g. agrees with their generic policies and is willing to accept utter clowns failing at being even remotely competent) or is too stupid/brainwashed/naive/etc. to even consider the reality. I can somewhat understand the first one, but neither can be changed IMHO. And i don't actually care, it's not my country, it's one that's really trying to distance itself from mine, so goodspeed to them.
And note, i'm not in any way saying the other UK parties are somewhat better or would do a better job, i don't have a serious opinion on them. But that does in no way excuse the clown car crash.
One can have their own opinion on whether brexit should have happened, but it’s extremely hard to argue that the tories haven’t been handling this poorly.
Yes, one can certainly argue about whether they've handled the fuel shortage well. However, I'm not sure if anyone else would have handled it any better. One way to look at it is that they've left the ball where it should be: with the haulage firms who must now pay more for drivers. It's not really the government's job to ensure that private haulage and petrochemical firms have as much access to cheap labour as they would like. It was always going to be an uncomfortable adjustment to make.
> One way to look at it is that they've left the ball where it should be: with the haulage firms who must now pay more for drivers.
Of course, this is actually sign of governmental incompetence. Yes, haulage firms will need to pay more, obviously. But the process of raising wages, training, and hiring drivers is a slow process. Even if every haulage firm decided overnight to raise wages high enough to attract new applicants, it will take months to train all of these people to become truck drivers. To expect the supply chain to handle just a sudden shock like this was very, very foolish of them.
Oh, and there's a bunch of non-wage stuff too, like Priti Patel threatening to arrest any truck driver who has an illegal immigrant in their truck, whether or not they were aware of them. I'm sure this won't have a chilling effect on cross-border trucking, will it?
Also, it's not exactly like the Tory party is the party of "you should pay your workers more", now is it?
The New York Times may well be junk, but you're not helping your argument with articles from Unherd and Spectator, both notorious "rent-a-quote" right-wing rags of ill repute. Next you'll be quoting Spiked.
I've also provided links from other sources if you find NYT unpalatable.
Classic problem for commodities. Fuel demand isn’t terribly elastic, most of us won’t random change how much we need to drive, but fuel purchases are very elastic. Given a risk of a shortage everyone can decide to top up their tank today rather than next week, and if enough people do that stations can run out.
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.
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.
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)
* 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).
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.
To combat your anecdata: I have an ev, and a pile of solar, I charge at home on a standard plug that goes into a wall socket. I don’t use any grid power and my car stays charged. I don’t put any strain on the grid.
Pretty obvious how ev ownership will play out. More chargers, more pv.
I'm not sure what "more pv" means here, apologies.
I see your point, in your situation that's great, but I live in an Nth floor apartment in a London borough, I don't have an option for solar, nor for a wall socket to power an EV, nor do any of my neighbours. We're entirely at the mercy of Freeholders to consider putting EV charging in and _only_ charging us the price of a small motor vehicle for the privilege, if they'll do it at all.
I suspect a significant percentage of the population, who like myself live in large cities or suburbs are in a similar position.
Someone told me recently that a mandate is now in place for new-build to at least build infrastructure to support EV chargers in bays, even if they're not built ahead of time. Of course given the racket that is property development, they'll not put them in and charge you a pretty penny to add it after the fact.
I would guess that charge stations in place of existing petrol/gas stations will become a thing, they will have very large solar installs.
I think solar will find its way onto every surface we can get it on. Distributed power networks are much easier to deal with than centralised ones.
You are right property developers are likely to shirk their responsibility here. But I think there will be a lot of charge Business popping up, doing deals with councils etc
> 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.
That's simply untrue - National Grid don't forsee a problem. [1] Peak power usage in the UK was in 2005 - energy saving measures have been reducing it ever since. [2] The grid is today only delivering around 70% of the power it delivered in 2005.
Electric cars individually may have high peak charging loads, but if you calculate the total average power draw per car over a years driving, it's only about 200W. We may have to implement some level of demand management either in the cars or car chargers, but that's not particularly complicated - all the infrastructure already exists.
I do agree that the charging infrastructure is a long way off. Every street of terraced houses needs to be dug up and wired up with regular spaced charging points.
Fair points. Perhaps I was a little overzealous with that statement, I'm not going to change it as it's critical (by incorrect) to this discussion.
The problem, as I understand it, is with the condition of the grid, not its capacity. I know homes in London who literally have flickering lights and power issues as a regular occurrence, I've experienced it myself, it's large cities like London which would benefit most from complete electrification of vehicles and the supplies and equipment is ageing.
With tenders being awarded to those who claim to be the most carbon-neutral (National Grid's words) as opposed to actually providing high quality equipment (warning: my opinion), I foresee the problem worsening.
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.
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.
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'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.
> 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.
I know several people who have brought jerry cans to petrol stations. None of them were panic buying / hoarding. All of them were buying fuel for other people who were literally at zero, having burned whatever little they had left in queues that led to nothing.
Beware the assumption that jerry cans == hoarding / panic buying. It's great for tabloids to stir up anger and resentment, but the real world is always more nuanced than the headline.
Yeah I'm not judging. Also I can imagine people whose lives depend on petrol (taxi drivers, delivery drivers etc.), at least I sympathise with the position.
In any case it seems to be the exceptions, not "everyone fills up the tank, then 20 jerry cans and a bottle of Coke".
It doesn't need to be panic buying, a relatively small increase in demand - 10-20% - can already put a lot of strain on the system. I don't recall there being much toilet paper hoarding over here, but stores were still sold out because people bought a little extra, just in case they would be out later.
And then seemingly over-corrected for it - a while later (late 2020 iirc, or early this year) a Waitrose delivery driver gave me a pack (I hadn't ordered) for free.
I was quite confused at the time, but I assume they were just dishing them out to free up capacity for other products. (I also assume stock control is quite highly automated, so you can certainly see how it would happen.)
Yes, that's a consequence of just in time supply chains. The benefit is that you dont' have to store a lot of product, but the downside is you run out unless you're careful about demand prediction.
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.
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.
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.
Whilst I cannot find empirical evidence illustrating the amount of "panic buying", it does seem to be quite widely accepted (across the government, media, general public and oil and gas industry) that people are panic buying. Unless you have evidence to support your claim I'm inclined to believe all the sources I've read.
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 :-)
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.
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.
> 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.
78 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadIt 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
Also, perhaps display where it thinks you are too, so you can determine if it's massively off.
That said I do like defaults and fewer settings etc.
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.
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 :)
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/opinion/britain-fuel-cris...
Don't trust the NYT?
https://www.vox.com/22700343/uk-fuel-crisis-brexit-covid-19-...
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/09/28/business/brexit-fuel-food...
https://www.indiatoday.in/business/story/uk-fuel-crisis-chao...
And so does reality. Brexit, recent Tory governments are mismanaged unmitigated disasters. Is there anything broadly positive that can be said of them? Vaccination was decently managed, that's for sure.
And note, i'm not in any way saying the other UK parties are somewhat better or would do a better job, i don't have a serious opinion on them. But that does in no way excuse the clown car crash.
Of course, this is actually sign of governmental incompetence. Yes, haulage firms will need to pay more, obviously. But the process of raising wages, training, and hiring drivers is a slow process. Even if every haulage firm decided overnight to raise wages high enough to attract new applicants, it will take months to train all of these people to become truck drivers. To expect the supply chain to handle just a sudden shock like this was very, very foolish of them.
Oh, and there's a bunch of non-wage stuff too, like Priti Patel threatening to arrest any truck driver who has an illegal immigrant in their truck, whether or not they were aware of them. I'm sure this won't have a chilling effect on cross-border trucking, will it?
Also, it's not exactly like the Tory party is the party of "you should pay your workers more", now is it?
Edit: sources for those who don’t believe me:
What’s the New York Times’s problem with Britain?
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/what-s-the-new-york-time...
The New York Times’ bizarre campaign against Britain
https://unherd.com/2020/01/what-has-the-new-york-times-got-a...
The New York Times is junk.
I've also provided links from other sources if you find NYT unpalatable.
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.
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).
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.
Pretty obvious how ev ownership will play out. More chargers, more pv.
I see your point, in your situation that's great, but I live in an Nth floor apartment in a London borough, I don't have an option for solar, nor for a wall socket to power an EV, nor do any of my neighbours. We're entirely at the mercy of Freeholders to consider putting EV charging in and _only_ charging us the price of a small motor vehicle for the privilege, if they'll do it at all.
I suspect a significant percentage of the population, who like myself live in large cities or suburbs are in a similar position.
Someone told me recently that a mandate is now in place for new-build to at least build infrastructure to support EV chargers in bays, even if they're not built ahead of time. Of course given the racket that is property development, they'll not put them in and charge you a pretty penny to add it after the fact.
I think solar will find its way onto every surface we can get it on. Distributed power networks are much easier to deal with than centralised ones.
You are right property developers are likely to shirk their responsibility here. But I think there will be a lot of charge Business popping up, doing deals with councils etc
Citation needed... The national grid transports less power today than it did 40 years ago, despite a much bigger population.
That's simply untrue - National Grid don't forsee a problem. [1] Peak power usage in the UK was in 2005 - energy saving measures have been reducing it ever since. [2] The grid is today only delivering around 70% of the power it delivered in 2005.
Electric cars individually may have high peak charging loads, but if you calculate the total average power draw per car over a years driving, it's only about 200W. We may have to implement some level of demand management either in the cars or car chargers, but that's not particularly complicated - all the infrastructure already exists.
I do agree that the charging infrastructure is a long way off. Every street of terraced houses needs to be dug up and wired up with regular spaced charging points.
[1]: https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero-sto... [2]: https://theconversation.com/britains-electricity-use-is-at-i...
The problem, as I understand it, is with the condition of the grid, not its capacity. I know homes in London who literally have flickering lights and power issues as a regular occurrence, I've experienced it myself, it's large cities like London which would benefit most from complete electrification of vehicles and the supplies and equipment is ageing.
With tenders being awarded to those who claim to be the most carbon-neutral (National Grid's words) as opposed to actually providing high quality equipment (warning: my opinion), I foresee the problem worsening.
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.
We created gas stations in less time, and they’re bigger and more logistically intense.
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.
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.
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?!
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.
I know several people who have brought jerry cans to petrol stations. None of them were panic buying / hoarding. All of them were buying fuel for other people who were literally at zero, having burned whatever little they had left in queues that led to nothing.
Beware the assumption that jerry cans == hoarding / panic buying. It's great for tabloids to stir up anger and resentment, but the real world is always more nuanced than the headline.
In any case it seems to be the exceptions, not "everyone fills up the tank, then 20 jerry cans and a bottle of Coke".
I was quite confused at the time, but I assume they were just dishing them out to free up capacity for other products. (I also assume stock control is quite highly automated, so you can certainly see how it would happen.)
This is ultimately worse for society, but the only rational response as a single actor.
Whilst I cannot find empirical evidence illustrating the amount of "panic buying", it does seem to be quite widely accepted (across the government, media, general public and oil and gas industry) that people are panic buying. Unless you have evidence to support your claim I'm inclined to believe all the sources I've read.
https://www.firmdalehotels.com/hotels/london/the-soho-hotel/...
I think I know what is that :) I was grepping for "fuel" in osmconvert csv dump (as in ameniity=fuel)
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/product...
[1]: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/access-free-address-data-using-a...
[2]: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/tools-s...
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.
It really depends on the traction now.
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.
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.