ThawWatch

Overview

ThawWatch is a Coderize product for the haulers who load heavy every spring: septic, logging, well drilling, gravel, propane and farm trucks. When the ground thaws, road agencies put seasonal weight restrictions (frost laws) on, and a load that was legal yesterday can earn a fine today. ThawWatch follows all 83 Michigan county road agencies and the state highways in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, shows the current status on free public maps, and alerts season-pass holders when restrictions go on or come off on the roads they run.

The Challenge

There is no single source for frost laws. Michigan's county road agencies publish through the County Road Association's feed, MDOT posts its own state highway bulletins, and Minnesota and Wisconsin publish frost zones and load limits as ArcGIS map layers, each in its own format and on its own schedule. Haulers were checking several websites every morning in spring. The product had to merge those feeds into one status per county or zone, alert only on real changes, and stay cheap to run outside the season.

Our Solution

We built a source adapter for each feed (CRAM, MDOT, MnDOT and WisDOT) that normalizes it into one status model, records every change, and triggers alerts only when a road someone follows actually changes. The public site is static and fast: state and county status pages with zone maps, so anyone can check for free. Accounts let a driver or fleet pick the counties and zones they run and choose how they're told.

Key Features

Results