Road Reports

Road reports

Road reports are the community part of Roadstr: people publish what they see — a speed camera, a police check, an accident, fog, a pothole — as signed Nostr events, and everyone nearby sees it on the map and hears it while driving. There is no Roadstr server in the middle.

What can be reported

Category	Marker stays up for
Police	4 hours
Police station	30 days
Speed camera	30 days
Traffic jam	1 hour
Accident	4 hours
Road closure	24 hours
Construction	15 days
Hazard	4 hours
Road condition	15 days
Pothole	7 days
Fog	4 hours
Ice	4 hours
Animal	1 hour
Other	4 hours

These are Roadstr's own lifetimes. Confirmations keep a marker alive and denials remove it sooner. (The expiration tag on an event is something different: it only tells relays when they may delete it.)

Making a report

1. Sign in with Nostr (Nostr and sign-in). Reporting needs an identity; viewing reports does not.
2. Open the report panel (Report an event), pick the category, and optionally add a speed limit (for speed cameras) and a comment.
3. The first time, a Public report notice appears. Read it: a report publishes its exact position, time, content and your public key to public Nostr relays. That is pseudonymous, not anonymous, can be linked to your other activity, and cannot be taken back reliably.
4. Choose Publish. With no connection the report is saved and published when you are back online.

Every event received from a relay is checked for a valid signature before it is trusted, so a relay cannot forge a report in someone else's name.

Confirming and disputing

Tap a marker. Still there extends it; Not there anymore shortens it. Both need a Nostr identity — without one the button says Login with Nostr to confirm or dispute. A marker shows how long ago it was reported.

Corrections

Only the author can change a report, and the protocol keeps it that way:

Event	Meaning
Kind 1317	A correction signed by the report's own author. This is the only edit that is authoritative.
Kind 1318	A correction requested by someone else. It does nothing until the author answers with a 1317.

In the app: as the author you can Add or update speed limit on your report; anyone else can Suggest a speed limit. The author sees Pending edit suggestions and chooses Accept suggestion.

Zaps and the activity inbox

Reporters can be tipped over the Lightning Network — Zap ⚡ (send sats) on a marker; see Lightning and zaps. When you are signed in, Roadstr notifies you of zaps, confirmations and denials that arrive on your own reports; they are also listed in the activity inbox.

Speed cameras

Two sources are shown together: reports from people (kind 1315) and an OpenStreetMap baseline fetched from Overpass and cached. The baseline is not a community report. A speed camera report can carry the limit it enforces, shown with the marker as the Reported speed limit.

Reports from other apps and over radio

Roadstr also reads, and optionally writes, the open jooray/roadstr report format, and can use a MeshCore LoRa radio as a second transport. See Interoperability and MeshCore.

Protocol summary

Kind	Purpose
1315	Report
1316	Confirmation or denial of a report
1317	Correction by the original author
1318	Correction requested by someone else

Roadstr's own layout is lat, lon, g, g, g, t, expiration[, maxspeed] with six-decimal coordinates and a vote of e, status. The default public relays are nos.lol, relay.primal.net, nostr.oxtr.dev and relay.damus.io.