If you build routing, dispatch, or telematics software for North American trucking, your roadmap has a recurring tax line on it — road data. Not the routing algorithm, not the UI: the unglamorous job of knowing what's actually happening on the pavement, in fifty states and a dozen provinces that each run their own system their own way. Below are the five problems that come up in nearly every conversation we have with fleet and logistics-software teams. None of them are exotic. All of them quietly burn engineering time.
1. Fifty States, Fifty Dialects
There is no single "US traffic API." There are dozens of state and provincial 511 systems, and they agree on almost nothing — different formats (some JSON, some XML, some an ArcGIS layer, some a scraped map endpoint), different field names for the same concept, different authentication, different refresh rates, different ideas of what "severity" even means. A team that wants national coverage ends up writing and maintaining a separate integration per jurisdiction, then babysitting all of them as feeds silently change shape.
This is the problem that eats the most time, because it never finishes. A feed that worked in March drops a field in September; a state migrates its portal and the old endpoint 404s. We wrote up how we normalize 30+ of these systems into one schema — the short version is that the per-jurisdiction mess becomes one consistent events and features contract, and keeping the adapters alive becomes our problem instead of yours.
