Radar 5.3 Release

Summary

Scotland gains two things at once: its four Low Emission Zones, which are a ban rather than a charge, and 945 of its nature reserves and country parks. Radar also stops being purely practical, with three new categories for the places you actually drove there to see.

Scotland's four Low Emission Zones

Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen each have a Low Emission Zone over the city centre, and Radar now draws all four.

These are a ban, not a charge, which is the part most guides get wrong. There is no daily fee and no way to pay your way in. If your vehicle does not meet the standard you should not drive into the zone, and if you do you get a fine. Radar draws them in rose rather than the purple it uses elsewhere, so you can tell at a glance that this is not a zone you can buy a day in.

The fine starts at £60, halved to £30 if you pay within 14 days, and then doubles every time you enter the same zone again within 90 days, up to £480 for a car or van and £960 for a minibus, bus, coach or lorry. It drops back to £60 once you have gone 90 days without a breach.

The standard is the same in all four cities, unlike England where every Clean Air Zone sets its own: Euro 6 diesel or Euro 4 petrol for cars and vans, Euro VI diesel or Euro IV petrol for buses, coaches and lorries. They run around the clock. Motorbikes and mopeds are not covered at all, which is unlike London's Low Emission Zone.

If you drive a motorhome, which of those two lines applies follows what your V5C says your vehicle is, not what it weighs or looks like. Scotland publishes no rule for motor caravans as such, so rather than guess on your behalf Radar shows you both lines and links the official vehicle checker. It takes a registration number and gives you a straight answer. Worth doing before you drive in, given what the second fine costs.

Scotland's nature areas

Around 945 shapes from NatureScot: National Nature Reserves, Local Nature Reserves, Country Parks, Regional Parks and other designated Nature Reserves.

Scotland is not Switzerland, and Radar does not pretend otherwise. The layer arrived with Switzerland, where staying the night inside one of these areas is broadly not tolerated. Scotland is the opposite: the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 gives you a legal right of responsible access across most land, wild camping included. So the shading here tells you what you are standing in, not that you have to leave. Local byelaws still apply in places, most famously the camping management zones around Loch Lomond, so read the signs at the spot.

The layer is renamed from "Protected areas" to Nature areas to match, since a blanket warning would now be a false one.

Two honest gaps. Scotland's national parks, the Cairngorms and Loch Lomond and the Trossachs, are not in what NatureScot publishes openly, so they need a different source and are not drawn yet. And Sites of Special Scientific Interest and the European wildlife designations are left off deliberately: they control what can be built rather than where you may go, and there are seventeen times as many of them.

Things to go and see

Radar has always been good at the practical stops and had nothing for the reason you drove there in the first place. Three new categories sit under Leisure, and picking Leisure time brings up all three:

• Landmarks: castles, forts, manor houses, monuments, city gates, lighthouses, windmills and watermills.
• Museums and Galleries: indoor, usually ticketed, and usually with opening hours worth checking first.
• Days Out: zoos, theme parks and aquariums, the ones that take a whole day and have a car park big enough for a motorhome.

Three categories rather than one on purpose. Radar keeps the nearest 50 of each category, so lumping them together would mean that in a heritage city the castle you came for loses its place to a row of war memorials 200 metres nearer. Split up, each gets its own room. It also separates the indoor, ticketed sort from the outdoor, free sort, which is a real decision on a wet afternoon.

They come from the open map, so what is there depends on what contributors have recorded, and they fill in country by country as each map copy is next refreshed, which happens monthly. Until a country comes round, the categories are there and empty rather than missing.

Smaller things

The Premium page no longer offers a free trial to somebody who already has Premium. It used to show the same "Start free trial" button to everyone, which reads as a billing failure if you had just subscribed, and led to a checkout the shop refuses anyway. Subscribers now see a short confirmation that everything below is unlocked, with the list itself unchanged as a reminder of what they have.

Still to come

Route planning still covers Great Britain only, on both plans. Places in Germany or Norway do not mean directions there.

The five other English Clean Air Zones and Oxford's zero emission zone are still not on the map. There is no single national feed for them, so each is its own piece of work, and an area with no zone drawn on it is not a guarantee there is no scheme there.

Offline map packs remain a planned Premium feature and will arrive with the native mobile app. They are not available yet on any platform.