back to article Highways Agency forecasts last year's traffic

Those of you thinking of heading out onto the UK highways and byways are advised not to bother checking out the Highways Agency's handy traffic forecaster, unless you're lucky enough to have a Back to the Future DeLorean: Highways Agency traffic forecaster with no option for 2008 Yup, it looks like the Agency's staff had a …

COMMENTS

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  1. John Macintyre

    hmm, more rating grabbers?

    Another system that was added to get votes/attention and unsurprisingly now that its there and old they've moved on to other things, thus dumping such tax expensive projects in the process... like building snowmen when the snow's melting...

  2. Alistair
    Happy

    Another rubbish and no doubt expensively procured govt website.

    Another obvious f***up is the inability to process routes that run between England and Wales, such as the M4, as the latter region comes under a different bureaucracy.

    Who builds these things?

  3. Andy ORourke

    Excellent

    I see the little pop down calender works, I mean it pops down you just cant select todays date on it, love these things, makes me smile on the first day back :-)

  4. Daniel Bennett
    Alien

    Select a date upto 2006?!

    ROFL.

    What if I want to know what the traffic WAS like in 2007? Then it would be handy...

  5. Martin Gregorie

    It would be nice if you could select anything

    The area selection doesn't work anyway, so it doesn't matter whether you selected a date or not. In addition, the nice drop-down calendar carefully doesn't display the rightmost columns to prevent anybody from selecting future months. Mind you, it doesn't actually do anything except report a programming error if you select any date that it does display.

    In short, the page doesn't work at all.

    Since its "developers" obviously never did any unit tests, let alone system testing, I hereby claim my system tester's fee.

  6. Peter \Horne

    Perfect

    My girlfriend works for the Highways Agency, she made all her own Christmas Cards this year, wished everybody a merry christmas and a great 2007

  7. Kate Menzies

    A Christmas Tale

    I think this is a rather poignant fable about which tells of the great toys we get for Christmas which we think are brilliant but if we don't look after them they end up just taking up space and not working properly. OK Highways Agency, a point well made, I'll go and feed that ruddy puppy.

  8. Daniel B.
    Joke

    Doc! Doc!

    Damn. I should've listened the Doc instead of drunk-driving the DeLorean over 88 mph last night. I think I jumped 2 years into the past!

    I need to get back to the Future!!!

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Forecasting an Ice Age too

    And if you select an area and check the box next to the weather logo and then mouse over the little triangles that appear you will see the weather as

    Current Temp -274c - or if you are lucky and are next to the coast

    Current Temp -272c - barmy or what!

    Fire Logo - 'cos it looks like we need to keep warm !

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    @ Martin.....

    > The area selection doesn't work anyway [ ... ]

    Works fine for me. Are you entirely sure you haven't disabled scripts, or something similar?

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Horns

    Hardly surprising...

    ...as the Highways Agency has just outsourced its IT to one of the Usual Suspects and they are now playing the game of, "You want us to do what? That wasn't in the contract - it'll cost you..."

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    known future roadworks

    Presumably "known future roadworks" are events which have settled between known, unknown, incomplete and complete based on future predictions.

    This is why no work appears to be taking place while driving past.the roadworks The workers have to wait around the site because if they don't nobody will have been there to do the work. If work was at some point complete. Noticable is the distortion in reality created by the highways agency and motorway traffic,

  13. Brian
    Coat

    lol

    No wonder they haven't got to 2008 yet! haha, they lost 2007!

  14. Phantom Wibbler
    Thumb Up

    Cracking!!

    "The Traffic Forecaster will not accept historical dates. Please enter a date between today and 31st December 2006."

    The Highways Agency are truly on the ball.

    Where's the traffic cone icon?

  15. Steve
    Thumb Down

    sounds like

    The year is a hard coded list, probably written in 2005 by some placement year student.

    The javascript is clearly broken, but you'd probably find that it worked okay on IE4.0 back in the aforementioned 2005 and if you said cross browser compatibility you'd probably be fired for knowing too much.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Another pointless bunch

    Thank goodness we don't have to suffer these Traffic Wombles in Scotland.

  17. Johnny FireBlade

    Great Scott!

    I was riding my bike through South Mimms services a week or two before Christmas and I saw a DeLorean on a low loader at the side of the road, decked out in full "Back to the Future" garb! I was very impressed! It had the "Mr Fusion" thing on the back and everything! Didn't get a chance to check for a flux capacitor though. :(

  18. Harry
    Unhappy

    Why does every government website ...

    ... insist on having a stupid and annoying ticker, that displays information either so slowly that its excruciating, or so quickly that you have to read it three times before you know what it's saying?

    Why not put the information in a good and proper TEXTAREA with scrollbars that people can read at their OWN pace?

  19. Pieter

    Under construction

    "Traffic Forecaster is temporarily unavailable due to technical difficulties. We are currently working to put this right and expect normal service to be resumed shortly.

    We apologise for the disruption to this service and any inconvenience it may have caused."

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    "Traffic Forecaster is temporarily unavailable"

    So, somebody at HA reads The Register.

    Lets hope they take notice and replace that unhelpful and annoying ticker at the same time.

  21. Paul
    Happy

    Normal service back soon...

    So that would be the borked site we had before with nothing working then?

    Great! And how much did this cost us?

  22. foxyshadis

    Technical difficulties

    Takes this long to add a new year to the dropdown? wth.

  23. spezzer
    Gates Horns

    hey Ive got a great idea....

    how about a Government Website Forecaster - it could predict which .gov.uk sites will be working in the near future. That way we could go straight to that site so we dont waste out time trying to get the pages on other sites working. It would be an index of sites not to visit. Some might say a complete waste of time - so another excellent potential government project!

  24. Anonymous John
    Coat

    Now fixed.

    Until the end of 2010, that is.

    Yellow fluorescent jacket with "Highways Agency Wankers" on the back.

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