I Built a Road Conditions Monitor Using n8n
My family was planning a trip from Boise to Seattle. The day before leaving, I checked the roads and found a mess: an interstate in Oregon was completely closed, and a Washington route was shut down due to a landslide.
Our journey crossed multiple mountain passes in multiple states, each with constantly changing conditions. Checking them all manually was tedious. So I automated it.
The Solution
I threw together an n8n workflow that runs every hour:
- Pulls data from Oregon, and Washington DOT APIs
- Filters to our specific routes
- Extracts critical events (closures, chain requirements, incidents)
- Sends to an LLM for analysis
- Emails me a summary
For critical alerts (closures mainly), the LLM summary also gets pushed to my phone via Pushover.
It Worked
The workflow ran continuously during the entire round trip. Instead of checking multiple websites, I got hourly digests in my inbox and immediate phone alerts for anything urgent.
When conditions changed while we were driving, I knew before reaching the affected area.
Implementation Notes
Setup took about an hour. State DOT APIs are public and reasonably well documented. The workflow logic is straightforward: fetch from multiple sources, filter by relevance, analyze, notify.
The LLM step was key for turning raw API data into readable summaries. Without it, I'd be parsing event codes and trying to figure out which "MP 127 chain required" actually affected me.
Result
Made it to Seattle and back without surprises. The automation did exactly what it needed to do.