About the service
Who runs YakNak, where the waiting times come from, how they are calculated and what they leave out.
YakNak shows how long the queues currently are at the road border crossings between Ukraine and Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Moldova. That is 37 crossings today: 9 on the Polish border, 3 on the Slovak, 6 on the Hungarian, 6 on the Romanian and 13 on the Moldovan.
The site answers one question: when to travel and which crossing to use. That is why every crossing page shows its typical week and its nearest alternatives alongside the live queue. Leaving two hours later, or driving 40 kilometres further, saves more time than almost anything else a traveller can do.
Who runs the site
YakNak is run by the nakordoni.eu team. This is not a third-party aggregator: we use our own border monitoring infrastructure, the same one that feeds nakordoni.eu. We say so plainly, because a reader should know where the data comes from and why it matches our other site.
The two projects differ in scope. nakordoni.eu is full monitoring: cameras, trucks, forecasts, per-crossing history. YakNak is narrower and more practical — cars, buses and pedestrians only, and only the question of when to go.
Editor
The texts on YakNak are looked after by Anna Wiśniewska. She edits the guides and crossing descriptions, checks every figure quoted in a text against the live data before it goes out, and is the first to read your error reports. If something in an article does not match what you see at the border, write via the contact form: she is the one who follows it up.
How the waiting time is calculated
Every crossing, direction and vehicle type has its own counter. It works like this:
Waiting time = minimum processing time + vehicles in the queue × average clearance rate.
Both constants are specific to the crossing and the vehicle type. For cars, the clearance rate in our calibration ranges from 2 to 10 minutes per vehicle depending on the crossing: a small point with two lanes clears a car more slowly than a large one with eight.
The queue count comes from four sources:
- the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine — official counts of vehicles in the waiting area;
- eCherha (echerha.gov.ua), the state electronic queue;
- road cameras on the approaches to the crossings;
- reports from travellers who are in the queue right now.
The data refreshes roughly every ten minutes. Every figure on the site carries the age of its last reading; where it says "no data", the source is silent, and we print a dash rather than fill the gap with a guess.
What the figure does not include
The waiting time is the time spent in the queue up to the barrier. It does not include:
- the checks themselves — passport control, customs, and a vehicle inspection where one is required. Allow another 15–30 minutes, and more if you are carrying goods or driving a car that is not yours;
- time on the Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Romanian or Moldovan side, where a separate queue exists;
- sudden events: a change of opening hours, a technical failure, a road closure.
The figure is an estimate by nature. It is good at showing proportion — "this crossing is three times slower than the one next to it" — and poor at predicting an exact minute.
Where the typical week comes from
The "when is the queue shortest" block on a crossing page is not a forecast. It is the median queue length over the last 60 days, calculated separately for every hour of every weekday. A median rather than an average: one exceptional day with 300 cars should not distort the picture of an ordinary Tuesday.
A crossing needs enough observation history before that block appears. Today 28 of the 37 crossings have it. For the rest we say the data is insufficient and name no specific day — admitting that we do not know beats guessing.
One detail matters: the unit in that block is vehicles in the queue, not minutes. The two numbers cannot be compared with each other.
What we do not publish
Trucks. The formula that works well for cars produces nonsense for lorries: with 177 vehicles queuing it calculates a wait of several days. Until we rebuild the model for freight, we publish nothing about it. An empty row is more honest than a wrong one.
Rail crossings. They have no car, bus or pedestrian lane, so no vehicle queue exists there. YakNak has no pages for them.
Crossings without data. A few Moldovan points do not yet send telemetry. Their pages remain — with a description, opening hours and the nearest alternatives — but a dash appears where an invented number would otherwise be.
Errors and corrections
If a figure on the site does not match what you see on the ground, or a crossing description is wrong, write to us through the contact form. We check every report of a discrepancy: it is the fastest way to find a broken source or a mis-calibrated crossing.
Corrections to data are applied as soon as they are verified. Corrections to page text are dated — every article shows when it was last updated.
Advertising
The site is free and funded by advertising. Ad units have no effect on the order of crossings in any list or on the waiting figures: sorting always follows the queue time, and no crossing can be moved up.
Data sources
Page updated