Accelerometers of smartphones will help to find holes on the roads

Every spring on the roads of Boston there are about 19,000 new holes. This is normal for any northern city, because asphalt inevitably degrades under the snow and reagents. In the spring, road services take vehicles to the streets to patch bald spots. Now they have come up with a new way to improve the quality of work.

In the department of urban mechanics, the Boston City Hall developed the Street Bump program for Android , which should register all the pits on the road and automatically send GPS coordinates to the road workers.

So far, the prototype of the program can only remove information from the accelerometer, but by the spring it will be finalized, so that Street Bump can really recognize the holes (a competition for the best hole recognition algorithm and other Street Bump improvements with prizes of $ 25,000).

If this application is installed at least a couple of hundreds of Boston motorists, then road services will be able to receive the coordinates of all 19,000 holes as they appear. Operational information allows you to patch the hole at an early stage, while it is small. Now Massachusetts spends about $ 2 million a year for this purpose, so a new program can save a lot of money.
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Today, Boston already has a warning system for new pits on the roads via SMS and e-mail, but drivers use the system not too actively, so the road services have to search for themselves. Information only about one of the six holes for repair comes from the citizens. If you automate crowdsourcing, it will become more efficient.

This is not the first crowdsourcing initiative from the Boston authorities. In 2009, they released the Citizens Connect program ( Android Market link ), through which citizens can take photos of problem areas in the city (graffiti, faded markings on the road, the same pits, etc.) and immediately send them to the mayor's office with coordinates and description.

via The Boston Globe