Manual / Overlays
Road incidents
- For
- a controller
- Status
- current
- Covers
- the Incidents tile, the Road incidents block on the overlay bar, and the Affected routes panel
- Last checked against the app
6f7727e(2026-08-19)
What the road authority says is shut, restricted or being worked on — and, in one further click, which of your routes are in it.
What you are looking at
Switch on Incidents in the Layers panel and every disruption in view is drawn three ways at once: a line along the affected road, a dot where it is, and a small shape inside the dot saying what kind of thing it is. Colour, line width and dot size all follow how much road is gone.
The key is in the Road incidents block at the bottom of the map:
| Band | What it means |
|---|---|
| Road closed | Nothing gets through |
| Restricted access | Passable, but not by a bus in service |
| Lanes closed | A lane or two out, traffic still flowing |
| No closure stated | The feed spoke, and what it said was that no road is gone |
They run darkest to lightest in that order, so the worst is the heaviest mark on the map whether or not you can tell the hues apart.
Under it: crash ✕ · roadworks ▲ · hazard ! · other ○ · a faded marker has reopened. The shapes carry the kind of incident because the map cannot write words on itself at this zoom.
At the top right of the block sits the count and the age — 18 incidents · 11 still active · 24 locations · 46 more filtered out · as at 14:28.
Click an incident for its own box: the headline, what state it is in, and then rows for Impact, Status, Lanes, Access, Direction, Road, Area, Melway, Start, End and — on the few that have one — a More link to the authority's own page. Rows with nothing to say are simply absent.
Two sources, not one
The overlay draws two separate products from the road authority, and they behave differently:
- Unplanned — crashes, hazards, flooding, fires. What has happened.
- Planned — roadworks and special events. What is going to happen.
They keep their own vocabularies, which is why the filter box gives each its own row: both publish something called Roadworks, and they do not mean the same thing by it.
The filter box, and what it starts on
Below the map, under Show:
- a row led by Planned and a row led by Unplanned, each with that product's incident types along it and a count in view beside each type. The word at the head of the row is a master switch — turn a product off and its type boxes go inert, because with the product hidden they cannot change anything;
- a Status row carrying the authority's own words — Active, Pending, Reopened, Inactive — spelled its way, not renamed;
- an On right now box, separate from Status on purpose. While it is ticked it can carry a note — incl. 6 with no stated times — because a record the app cannot place in time is kept, not hidden: one that cannot be ruled out is one you should still see;
- a Reset filters link, which appears only when there is something to reset.
The overlay opens narrowed, and it says so in the count line: Unplanned only, Active only, On right now unticked. That is deliberate — what a controller opens the map for is the road that is shut right now — and the number of records the filters removed is always on the bar, so a narrowed view never reads as an empty city.
Every row states its whole vocabulary from the start, whether or not anything in view is of that type. A type showing 0 means none in this view, not a control that does nothing.
Separately, under the filters: Include tow trucks and retired records, with a count of how many are being left out. Tow allocations are a truck attending a scene rather than a road disruption, and they arrive labelled as hazards, so they are dropped unless you ask for them. Ticking this box goes back to the source for them: unlike every other filter here, those records are not on your screen at all until you ask.
Which of our routes are hit?
The button of that name, at the foot of the block, opens the Affected routes panel. It never runs by itself: press Check now and the app measures every in-force closure against the loaded timetable.
| On screen | What it is |
|---|---|
| Check now / Check again / Checking… | The one control that asks the question |
| Only Kinetic Melbourne | Narrows the answer to your own operators. Present only once the app knows who "ours" is; the name is your Operator scope |
| 7 routes affected · 3 ours | The answer, with the sweep's own summary under it: how many incidents touch a bus route, what the filters below the map were letting through, and that the list is worst-first by published delay |
| Our routes | Your operators' routes, first |
| Other operators | Everyone else's |
| Could not place on a route | Incidents the sweep could not resolve. Not "no buses affected" |
| Open route on a row | Draws that route on the map |
Rows carry the route number, the direction, how many incidents are on it, the worst band, and a delay column.
What the numbers mean
| On screen | What it is |
|---|---|
| Road closed / Restricted access / Lanes closed / No closure stated | How much road is gone, taken from the authority's own words |
| 18 incidents · 24 locations | One incident can close several places, so the two differ. The map draws every location; the count counts the incident |
| 11 still active | How many of those still have a location the authority has not reopened. The feed keeps a record long after the road is given back, so this is usually the number that matters |
| 46 more filtered out | What your filter boxes removed from that view |
| ~10 min, ~10+ min | The authority's published delay estimate. The ~ says estimate; the + says the published range had no top, so it is a floor |
| End ~16:30 | A forecast clearance time, not an observed one. Start carries no ~: it is when the record was raised |
| — in the delay column | Nothing was published. It is not a zero |
What they do not mean
The band measures the road, not your service. Road closed on a street no bus serves is still Road closed. What turns it into an operational fact is the Affected routes panel — and there, a lane closure on a carriageway your bus actually drives deliberately outranks a full closure of the street behind it.
"No closure stated" is not missing data. The feed said something, and what it said was that no road is gone — "changed conditions", "traffic delays". It is ranked last for that reason, and it is usually the largest band on a busy view.
Status is not "is it on now", and neither answers the other. A planned record whose works finished last year can still be published as Active, and most planned records sit at Pending including ones inside their window right now. On right now answers the timing question and cannot tell you the authority has cleared the road; Status answers the authority's own question and cannot tell you whether the works are running. That is why they are two controls on one row with a rule between them.
A reopened road is still drawn. Faded, and still there, because a road that reopened ten minutes ago is worth seeing. It also still carries the band it had — Road closed, reopened — because "how much road is gone" and "is it on now" are different questions and the app refuses to merge them.
A blank delay is the loudest thing in the list. The unplanned feed publishes no delay estimates at all, so a crash closing an arterial shows — while a lane closure for scheduled works shows ~5 min. Read the band, not the delay column, when they disagree. Where a sum is shown, the count of incidents that stated nothing is kept beside it rather than folded in as zero.
Planned works are not a complete list. The planned product hands over a fixed window of records and no more; the app says when it has been cut short rather than implying it has everything.
"Nothing affected" and "we did not look" are different answers, and the panel distinguishes them. An empty Our routes section says so in words; incidents the sweep could not resolve go under Could not place on a route instead of disappearing.
The sweep is a snapshot, and it does not repeat itself. It answers for the incidents in hand at the moment you pressed the button, against the loaded timetable. It does not refresh with the map, and moving the map does not re-ask it.
None of this is a diversion. Seeing that a road is shut is not recording what you did about it — that is the Diversions tab.
When it looks wrong
There is no Incidents tile. This deployment has no incident source. Ask whoever administers it.
The map is nearly empty during a bad morning. Check the filters: the overlay opens showing unplanned, active records only, and the bar states how many it removed. Reset filters puts back your own starting point.
A type box is ticked and nothing changes. Its product's master switch is off — the boxes go inert with it. Turn Planned or Unplanned back on at the head of the row.
The bar says it is waiting. The same line the traffic overlay uses:
Waiting for the first poll…
The incident feeds are switched on for this deployment and nothing has come back from them yet.
The Affected routes panel says nothing has been checked. It only ever answers when asked. Press Check now.
A route row says Not placed. The feed names a route that the app could not match to a line it can draw, so there is nothing to select. Hovering it says so.