The site, evolving in public

Virginia Beach replaces Nashville — and the last seed retires

The fourth metro is now Virginia Beach (Hampton Roads), replacing Nashville. Tennessee had to go: unlike the other states, it publishes no open live-incident feed, so it could never be more than seed. Virginia is the opposite — VDOT is one of the most open DOTs in the country.

Virginia Beach lands fully real and keyless: AADT from VDOT's open traffic-volume data (I-264 195,000, I-64 177,000, I-664 116,000), congestion from the TomTom index, state road-safety from FARS, and 172 real incident records — fatal and serious-injury crashes on I-64, I-264, and I-664, archived from VDOT's open crash database. These are dated, located, aggregate crash records; presented factually, never sensationalized.

That change clears the last seed data from the site. All four metros — Atlanta, Columbus, Orlando, and Virginia Beach — now run entirely on real state DOT data. One honest note: Virginia's records are archived serious crashes rather than the live-conditions snapshots the other three use, badged VDOT so the source is always clear.

Still ahead for Virginia Beach: live per-corridor congestion (the same TomTom Flow proxy the other metros use, once its three points are tuned).

Ohio goes real — OHGO's public API retires the Columbus seed

Ohio's incident records are now real, archived from ODOT's OHGO public API (public-domain data, free key used only at fetch time — never shipped). That retires the Ohio seed and makes three states real now: Georgia, Florida, and Ohio. Only Tennessee remains seed.

Ohio's live incident list is short statewide, but OHGO also exposes construction. Rather than import all ~950 statewide construction zones — which would swamp the archive with low-interest planned work — the Columbus-metro construction was kept and matched to the I-70, I-71, and I-270 corridors, alongside the statewide incidents. Real, focused, and honest about scope.

Tennessee is the last seed state, and the hard one: TDOT's SmartWay has no clean public developer feed. It'll take a different approach when its turn comes.

Florida goes real — a keyless FDOT feed retires the Orlando seed

Florida's incident records are no longer seed. They're now archived from FDOT's open DIVAS traffic-events service — a public ArcGIS feed, no API key required — replacing the Florida seed rows with real, statewide events: crashes, road work, disabled vehicles, and closures across the state, badged FL511.

Like Georgia, most fall outside the two tracked Orlando corridors, so they live in the Archive as real statewide Florida records, each with a permanent page. The Orlando-area ones enrich the metro and I-4 corridor pages. Congestion events were left out on purpose — that's a flow state already covered by the site's live congestion, not an incident to archive.

That makes two states real (Georgia and Florida) and two still seed (Tennessee and Ohio). Ohio's OHGO has a free public API and is the likely next to flip; Tennessee lacks a clean public feed and will take longer.

Road-safety numbers land — statewide FARS deaths per metro

Each metro page now carries a road-safety figure: the number of people killed on that state's roads in 2024, from NHTSA's Fatality Analysis Reporting System (via IIHS) — Georgia 1,403, Tennessee 1,197, Ohio 1,157, Florida 3,138. Each is sourced and badged SOURCED, and labeled plainly as a statewide figure, not a metro-only one.

This is deliberately statewide, not per-corridor. Attributing fatal crashes to a specific corridor segment requires geocoding the raw FARS dataset to each route — real work worth doing, and marked on every metro page as a planned next step rather than faked. Presented as aggregate annual totals: the reference does not sensationalize, and covers safety as duty.

That keeps the honesty rule intact: a real, cited number goes up now; the finer-grained version is named, not invented.

Congestion lands on the metro pages — cited, no key required

Every metro page now carries a real congestion figure: the hours the average driver lost to rush-hour traffic in 2025, from the TomTom Traffic Index — Atlanta 61, Nashville 57, Columbus 31, Orlando 29. Each is sourced to that city's TomTom page and badged SOURCED, the same standard as the corridor AADT numbers.

This is TomTom's published annual dataset, not a live feed — so it needs no API key and no backend, and it goes on the reference today. Live, minute-by-minute congestion (the TomTom Traffic Flow API) is a separate step that waits on the keys-and-proxy backend, where the key can stay server-side and never touch the browser.

Doctrine note: congestion is allowed to read live here in a way incident records are not. This annual figure is the honest first rung of that — real, comparable across all four metros, and cited.

Georgia goes real — the seed retires, the GA511 archive lands

The Georgia incident records are no longer seed. They are now archived directly from the state's official GA511 feed — 108 real, statewide records replacing the 12 hand-built Georgia seed rows. Every real record carries a teal source badge (GA511); the amber seed badge now appears only on Tennessee, Ohio, and Florida, which are still awaiting their state keys.

Because the feed is statewide, most of these records fall outside the four tracked Atlanta corridors — they are real Georgia road incidents from Rome to Valdosta, each with its own permanent page and all queryable in the Archive by state and free text. Eight of them land on tracked corridors (six on I-285, two on I-20) and now show as real history on those corridor pages.

A note on status: these are point-in-time 511 snapshots, so each is marked 'archived' rather than active or cleared — the honest label for a record captured at archive time, not a live status. This is the first proof that the schema swap works exactly as designed: real records simply lack the seed flag, and the badge changes itself.

Next: the same treatment for Tennessee, Ohio, and Florida once their keys are in hand — and the two pending AADT lookups (I-20 Atlanta, I-40 Nashville) that still await a citable count.

First real numbers — traffic volume lands on every corridor page

The reference just gained its first non-seed statistic: AADT — annual average daily traffic, the official state-DOT count of vehicles per day — now appears on corridor pages, each figure cited to its agency, year, and measured segment, with a link to the source. These numbers carry a green SOURCED badge; they are real, not seed.

Ten of twelve corridors are covered so far: the Downtown Connector's 437,000+ at its busiest point, the I-285 top end's 238,000, I-65 Nashville's 185,517 between Armory Dr and I-440, the Columbus downtown split's ~175,000, I-4's ~200,000 through downtown Orlando, SR 408's 164,000+, and more.

Two corridors — I-20 (Atlanta) and I-40 (Nashville) — show 'lookup pending' instead of a number, because no citable published figure was in hand at ship time. That is the rule here: nothing is published until it can be cited. Those two will fill in from the GDOT and TDOT count portals, and this page will say so when they do.

v1 ships — Traffic's First Wiki opens

tm-czar.com v1 is live: a permanent, citable page for every corridor, metro, incident, Road Card, source, and topic we track — plus the four zones on top of them. The Archive and the Directory are open to everyone; the Live Board sits behind a free account (demo gate in v1).

What v1 honestly is: the structure of the reference, complete; the data, thin and clearly badged. Every incident record on the site today is seed data shaped exactly like the live 511 archive it will be swapped for. The 511 key on hand covers Georgia; Tennessee, Ohio, and Florida records shown are seed. Nothing here is a national incident record, and we will never imply otherwise.

What accrues from here: the incident archive deepens weekly, Road Cards date-stamp the metros day by day, and every page keeps its URL forever. That permanence is the product.

Roadmap — the backend, in order

v1 is a deploy-ready front end on seed data, by design. The backend arrives as four named steps, each its own Build Register line:

1 — Hosting. The static front end goes onto a host with clean URLs and the permanent-page guarantee.

2 — Auth. A real account provider replaces the demo gate on the Live Board and advanced query.

3 — Keys & proxy. A small server holds the API keys and proxies the live feeds — 511 incidents, gas averages, congestion — so no key ever ships to a browser.

4 — The live archive. The 511 archive becomes the real data source behind the Archive and every corridor page; seed records retire, and the seed badges disappear with them.

No dates promised here — each step lands when it lands, and this page will say so when it does.