Highwaysengland WebTRIS Traffic Flow API

Name: WebTRIS Traffic Flow API
Brand: WebTRIS Traffic Flow API
Availability: InStock

✓ Official Vendor SpecIOTSensor Datanone10 EndpointsREST

For Agents

Query roadside traffic sensor data for England's strategic road network — list monitoring sites, fetch daily quality metrics, and pull traffic flow reports between dates.

Install Jentic One Beta

Connect the WebTRIS Traffic Flow API to your agent

Jentic One is a self-hosted execution layer for AI agents. It lets your agent call the WebTRIS Traffic Flow API, or any other public or private API you need. You set the rules, the agent never sees your credentials, and every call is logged.

Two steps, two machines. Install the instance in a safe environment, then register your agent from wherever it runs.

Step 1: Jentic One Host machine

# On the machine that will host your Jentic One instance:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jentic/jentic-one/main/tools/install.sh | sh

Step 2: Agent machine

# On the machine where your agent runs (keep this separate from the instance):
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jentic/jentic-one/main/tools/install.sh | sh
jentic register       # connects your agent to your Jentic One instance

Jentic One is in public beta. The setup above keeps your agent separate from the instance, which is what you want before using real credentials: an agent running as the same OS user as Jentic One can read its stored keys directly. Just evaluating? A single local install is fine to start. See the secure deployment guide for the tiers.

Capabilities

What an agent can do with WebTRIS Traffic Flow API.

List all WebTRIS monitoring sites and retrieve a single site by ID

Enumerate site types such as MIDAS or TAME loops to filter monitoring stations

Pull regional area boundaries and the sites contained in each area

GET STARTED

Start building with WebTRIS Traffic Flow API

Explore with Jentic

View OpenAPI Document

WebTRIS is the National Highways traffic data service for England, exposing roadside sensor data through ten REST endpoints. The API returns lists of monitoring sites, site types, regional areas, and daily and aggregated traffic quality metrics, plus site-level reports across configurable date ranges. It is unauthenticated and free to consume, which makes it suitable for transport analytics, journey planning research, and academic studies of motorway and trunk road traffic flow. Coverage is limited to the strategic road network operated by National Highways.

Use Cases

Patterns agents use WebTRIS Traffic Flow API for, with concrete tasks.

★ Transport Analytics Research

Universities and consultancies studying motorway flow use WebTRIS to pull historic counts and speeds for England's strategic road network. The /reports/{start_date}/to/{end_date}/{report_type} endpoint returns aggregated metrics that can be loaded into a notebook without any authentication, so a research agent can build a dataset in minutes.

Pull the daily traffic report for site type 'MIDAS' between 2025-01-01 and 2025-12-31 and load the results into a pandas DataFrame.

Journey Time Quality Audit

Journey planning products that consume third-party congestion feeds need to verify that the underlying sensors were healthy. WebTRIS exposes /quality/daily and /quality/overall so an agent can score sensor reliability before treating downstream travel-time estimates as trustworthy.

For every site in area 7, fetch the daily quality score for the past 30 days and flag any site with quality below 80 percent.

Geographic Site Discovery

Engineering teams designing a new traffic study need a map of available monitoring sites. The /areas, /sites, and /sitetypes endpoints together describe the network: regional boundaries, sites within each area, and the technology installed at each site. An agent can enumerate this hierarchy without an API key.

List all areas, then for area 6 list all sites, and for each site report its site type from /sitetypes/{siteType_Id}/sites.

AI Agent Traffic Briefing

An AI assistant prepares a daily traffic briefing for a logistics operations team. Through Jentic, the agent searches for the relevant WebTRIS operation, loads the schema, and executes the GET against /reports for the chosen sites. No credentials are needed because WebTRIS is open, but Jentic still standardises the call surface alongside authenticated APIs.

Each weekday at 06:00, search Jentic for 'get daily traffic report from WebTRIS' and execute the report for the operations team's 12 monitored sites for the previous day.

Key Endpoints

10 endpoints — webtris is the national highways traffic data service for england, exposing roadside sensor data through ten rest endpoints.

METHOD

PATH

DESCRIPTION

GET

/v{version}/areas

List all regional areas

GET

/v{version}/sites

List all monitoring sites

GET

/v{version}/sites/{site_Ids}

Get details for selected sites

GET

/v{version}/quality/daily

Get daily site data quality

GET

/v{version}/reports/{report_type}

Get a daily traffic report

GET

/v{version}/reports/{start_date}/to/{end_date}/{report_type}

Get a traffic report between two dates

GET

/v{version}/areas

List all regional areas

GET

/v{version}/sites

List all monitoring sites

GET

/v{version}/sites/{site_Ids}

Get details for selected sites

GET

/v{version}/quality/daily

Get daily site data quality

GET

/v{version}/reports/{report_type}

Get a daily traffic report

Why Jentic?

Three things that make agents converge on Jentic-routed access.

Credential isolation

WebTRIS is unauthenticated, so no credentials need to be stored. Jentic still routes calls through the standard execution layer so the agent's call pattern is identical to APIs that require keys.

Intent-based discovery

Agents search by intent (e.g., 'get a WebTRIS traffic report') and Jentic returns the matching report or sites operation with its parameter schema, so the agent picks the right endpoint without reading docs.

Time to first call

Direct WebTRIS integration: half a day to map sites, areas, and report types. Through Jentic: under 20 minutes — search, load schema, execute.

FAQs

Specific to using WebTRIS Traffic Flow API through Jentic.

What authentication does the WebTRIS Traffic Flow API use?

WebTRIS does not require authentication — there are no API keys or tokens. Through Jentic the API is wired into the same search and execute flow as authenticated APIs, so agents can call /sites and /reports the same way they call any other tool.

Can I pull historic traffic flow between two dates?

Yes. GET /v1/reports/{start_date}/to/{end_date}/{report_type} returns aggregated metrics across the requested window for the chosen report type. The matching daily endpoint /v1/reports/{report_type} returns a single day.

What are the rate limits for the WebTRIS API?

The OpenAPI specification does not declare rate limits. National Highways treats WebTRIS as a public service, so heavy batch jobs should add backoff and avoid parallel scraping of every site to remain a good citizen.

How do I find sites within a specific region through Jentic?

Run pip install jentic, then await client.search('list WebTRIS sites in an area'), load the schema for GET /v1/areas/{area_Ids}, and execute with the area ID. The response contains the sites for that area.

Does WebTRIS cover local council roads?

No. WebTRIS only covers England's strategic road network operated by National Highways — motorways and major A-roads. For local authority roads use the relevant council open-data portals.

How do I check whether sensor data is reliable for a given day?

Call GET /v1/quality/daily for the site and date in question. The quality score lets an agent decide whether to trust the underlying flow report or to fall back to a different site.