A slightly more detailed version of the About page, for anyone curious how the data actually gets here.
The short version
This site doesn’t have a team of people visiting 116 service stations. It pulls from a handful of open, official data sources, cross-references them against each other, and refreshes on a schedule, with clear labelling wherever the data is thin, stale, or unmatched.
The sources, and what each one actually gives us
OpenStreetMap provides the foundation: every service area’s name, location, operator, and basic facilities (fuel, food, toilets, accessible toilets). It’s community-maintained, which means it’s usually accurate for where things are, but less consistent for operational detail.
Open Charge Map provides live-ish EV charging data: how many physical charging points are at a site, their maximum power, and which network(s) run them (Gridserve, Tesla, Ionity, and so on). This is genuinely separate infrastructure from the fuel/facilities data: a site can have excellent OpenStreetMap coverage and no EV data nearby, or vice versa.
Fuel Finder, the UK government’s official scheme under the Motor Fuel Price (Open Data) Regulations 2025, provides real per-litre prices, unleaded, diesel, and where applicable premium/renewable variants, updated as retailers report them. A “price may be stale” badge means the underlying retailer hasn’t reported a change in a while, not that our data pull failed.
Matching a site to a motorway
This turned out to be surprisingly hard. OpenStreetMap doesn’t reliably tag which motorway or junction a services site sits on, so we work it out geometrically: finding the nearest point on the actual motorway network, then the nearest junction marker along that road. It’s accurate for the vast majority of sites; a handful (mostly ones on A-roads rather than motorways proper) aren’t matched yet, and show as such rather than getting a guessed answer.
The freshness badges
Every listing shows when it was last checked by an actual person:
- Green: verified within the last 90 days
- Amber: checked within the last year
- Red: not yet verified, or over a year since the last check
This is deliberately separate from when the underlying data was last fetched. A site can have perfectly current fuel prices and still show a red badge, because nobody’s personally confirmed the wider listing is accurate recently. We’d rather be honest about that gap than paper over it.
What we don’t do
We don’t scrape other motorway services websites, and we don’t use AI-generated descriptions dressed up as local knowledge. If a fact is on this site, it traces back to one of the sources above, or to someone who’s actually checked it in person.