Everything happening in Frankfurt right now — in English.
Frankfurt Radar watches the city's official German-language feeds — transit disruptions, weather warnings, road closures, police reports, fire department incidents, strikes, festivals, trade fairs, and sports — translates everything to English, and delivers it to you in near real-time. Built for expats, travelers, and anyone who doesn't want to parse Beamtendeutsch at 7 a.m.
Website: frankfurt-radar.com Telegram channel: @FrankfurtRadar Telegram bot: @frankfurt_radar_bot
| What you get | Setup | |
|---|---|---|
| 🖥️ Website | Live map and alert feed with filters, weather radar, and an AI city summary | None — just open it |
| 📢 Telegram channel | Every alert, unfiltered, as it happens | Join the channel |
| 🤖 Telegram bot | Only the alerts you care about — your lines, your highways, your neighborhood | Message the bot, send /start |
New to Frankfurt Radar? The User Guide walks through all three.
| Source | What it covers |
|---|---|
| 🚇 Transit (RMV) | S-Bahn, U-Bahn, Tram, Bus, and Regional disruptions |
| ⛈️ Weather (DWD) | Official weather warnings, from minor to extreme |
| 🚨 Police | Frankfurt police press releases |
| 🔥 Fire | Feuerwehr Frankfurt active incidents by district |
| Highway closures and roadworks (A3, A5, A66, A661, …) | |
| 🚧 City Roads | Road construction and closures inside Frankfurt |
| 🪧 Strikes | Labor strike alerts affecting transit, retail, and public services |
| 🎉 Festivals | City festivals, markets, and parades — with dates and locations |
| 🎪 Trade Fairs | Events at Messe Frankfurt |
| ⚽ Sports | Eintracht Frankfurt home games and Deutsche Bank Park events |
Everything arriving in German is automatically translated to English before it reaches you.
frankfurt-radar.com shows all active alerts on an interactive map and a filterable feed:
- Filter by source, transit service, line, or severity — your selections are remembered
- Search across all alerts in real time
- Weather radar playback — precipitation observations and forecasts animated on the map
- Weather overlay — current conditions, rainfall, and daily high/low forecast at a glance
- Dark mode, mobile-optimized layout, and opt-in browser notifications
- No cookies, no accounts, no personal data — just open it
Instead of making you read forty alerts, City Pulse reads them for you. Every hour, an AI synthesizes all active alerts into a short situational overview: what's really going on, which alerts are connected, and one practical recommendation.
Five categories — Weather, Transport, Roadworks, Incidents, Events — each get a live status and trend, shown right on the map. Bot subscribers can get the pulse delivered by DM at 08:00, 12:00, or 18:00, or fetch it any time with /pulse.
Curious how it works? The methodology page explains it in plain language, and docs/analysis.md has the full technical breakdown. City Pulse also reviews itself: an admin-triggered AI agent periodically audits cost, translation behaviour, and scoring accuracy, and proposes concrete fixes as a pull request — see docs/review.md.
@frankfurt_radar_bot delivers filtered alerts straight to your DMs. A button-based setup wizard lets you pick:
- Sources — any combination of the ten sources above
- Transit — specific services (S-Bahn, U-Bahn, …) or individual lines (S3, U4, …)
- Roads — specific highways, full or partial city closures
- Location keywords — get any alert mentioning your neighborhood (e.g. Bockenheim), regardless of source
- Quiet hours — buffer alerts overnight and get a morning briefing at your wake-up time
- City Pulse delivery — the daily AI summary at a time of your choosing
Search active alerts with /search, check the city with /pulse, and delete everything with /deletedata — full command list in the User Guide.
Frankfurt Radar ships a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, so AI assistants like Claude can answer questions such as "any S-Bahn disruptions right now?" or "what's the city pulse?" using live data. To request an API key for the hosted instance, open an MCP access request; setup details are in the Self-Hosting Guide.
Frankfurt Radar is open source and designed to be self-hosted — the same setup that runs frankfurt-radar.com, packaged as Docker Compose:
git clone https://github.com/jctots/frankfurt-radar
cd frankfurt-radar
cp .env.example .env # fill in your API keys
docker compose up -dThe Self-Hosting Guide covers everything: environment variables, the full configuration reference, the Telegram bot, the admin dashboard, and the MCP server.
| Document | What's inside |
|---|---|
| User Guide | Using the website, channel, and bot — onboarding, quiet hours, commands |
| Self-Hosting Guide | Setup, configuration reference, admin dashboard, MCP server |
| Architecture | Containers, data flow, database schema, pipeline internals |
| City Pulse Analysis | How the AI summary works — scoring, trends, calibration |
| City Pulse Review Pipeline | How City Pulse audits its own cost, translation behaviour, and scoring, and proposes fixes |
| Telegram Bot Setup | Creating and wiring up your own bot |
Frankfurt Radar is built with privacy by design:
- The status page collects no personal data — no cookies, no accounts
- Anonymous analytics via self-hosted Umami (cookie-free, no IP storage)
- The Telegram bot stores only your chat ID and preferences — no name, username, or message content
- GDPR compliant — send
/deletedatato permanently erase all stored data - All data stored and processed within the EU (Hetzner Frankfurt)
- Weekly automated
pip auditandgitleakssecret scanning (CI badges above) - Periodic security audits covering infrastructure hardening, OWASP Top 10, and dependency CVEs
Full details: PRIVACY.md | SECURITY.md
| Source | License | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| RMV | RMV Open Data ToS | Commercial redistribution requires a separate agreement |
| DWD | DL-DE-Zero | Weather warnings (via BrightSky) and radar imagery; freely reusable |
| Presseportal (Police) | Non-commercial only (§87g(2) UrhG) | RSS summary only; links to original press release |
| Feuerwehr Frankfurt | Public Bluesky feed | @feuerwehrffm.bsky.social via AT Protocol |
| Autobahn API | Autobahn API ToS | Public federal data |
| City of Frankfurt WFS | Public municipal data | Road construction and closures |
| OpenLigaDB | CC BY-SA 4.0 | Bundesliga match data |
| Ticketmaster | Ticketmaster API ToS | Optional; Deutsche Bank Park events |
See CONTRIBUTING.md for local development setup, project structure, and how to add new alert sources.
MIT — see LICENSE.
Frankfurt Radar is free and ad-free. If it saves you a missed train or a soaked commute, a coffee helps keep the server running.
