Have you ever been on a motorway and wanted to stop at a services? Why is it such an annoyingly low information problem? Sure, you can squint at that that big green sign that tells you what’s at the next service station, but how do you know what’s at the service station after? It’s important information! Example: the nearest one might have a Starbucks, but I’d rather wait until the next one if it has a Costa.

This struck me as not only annoying, but incredibly easy to solve. So I did.

It does exactly what is says on the tin. It tells you the NextServiceStation™.

It is available on NextServiceStation.co.uk.

NextServiceStation works by taking two sets of GPS coordinates (technically GNSS, but no one knows the difference), and then working out which motorway you are on, which direction you are heading, and then which service stations are the next ones along. It then tells you what’s there: fuel, food, shops, etc.

NextServiceStation’s backend api is written in Go.

The database is Postgres, with the PostGIS extension for GIS queries.

The frontend is a Vite React app with tailwind.

Most of the data needed for this is already available, but just scattered into a few different sources:

The service stations and their shops, restaurants, etc are from the incredible Motorway Services Online website. The motorway data is from the Overpass API. The fuel price data is from the GOV.UK Fuel Price API. To gather this data and keep it all fresh I wrote standalone Python scripts that run on a cronjob. They download the data, process it, and then upload it to the Postgres database.

Made by Evan Madurai in Leeds, United Kingdom.

Data from Motorway Services Online, Overpass, and Wikipedia.