'Street Bump' app detects potholes, alerts Boston city officials
The next time your car hits a pothole, a new technology
could help you immediately tell someone who can do something about it.
Boston officials are testing an app called Street Bump
that allows drivers to automatically report the road hazards to the city as
soon as they hear that unfortunate "thud," with their smartphones
doing all the work.
The app's developers say their work has already sparked
interest from other cities in the U.S., Europe, Africa and elsewhere that are
imagining other ways to harness the technology.
Before they even start their trip, drivers using Street
Bump fire up the app, then set their smartphones either on the dashboard or in
a cup holder. The app takes care of the rest, using the phone's accelerometer
-- a motion-detector -- to sense when a bump is hit. GPS records the location,
and the phone transmits it to a remote servers hosted by Amazon Inc.'s Web
services division.
The system filters out things like manhole covers and
speed bump using a series of algorithms -- including one that can tell if the
initial motion is up over a speed bump, as opposed to down into a pothole. If
at least three people hit a bump in the same spot, the system recognizes it as
a pothole.
As in many northern cities, potholes are a real problem
for Boston, where crews patch about 19,000 of them a year following the annual
freeze-thaw cycle, according to Matthew Mayrl, chief of staff in the city's
public works department.
"So you can imagine that driving 806 miles of
roadway and getting an accurate count of where every pothole is a gigantic task,"
he said.
City officials hope the app might eventually allow them
to save money by creating a real-time map of potholes that need to be fixed and
eliminating the need to send out city trucks or contract an engineering company
to troll hundreds of miles of roadways looking for damage.
"What this technology allows us to do -- because we
imagine dozens and hundreds and possibly thousands of people using it -- it
essentially creates a new way for people to donate their data in solving
public-good challenges," said Nigel Jacob, co-chairman of the Boston
Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics, which manages the project.
Street Bump is different from Boston's first app, Citizen
Connect, which required users to actively send a text of tweet, visit a website
or call a 24-hour hotline to report a pothole or other nuisances. Other cities,
including Honolulu, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio, have
encouraged residents to report potholes using Facebook, Twitter, or special
apps that allow residents to request city services using their smartphones.
Street Bump became available for free in the iTunes store
in June, and experts are working on the Android version.
Jacob said "a couple of hundred" of users have
downloaded the app so far, and developers are still trying to figure out how
many will be needed to make the software more useful. The project's next big
phase, he said, will be expanding the app to other cities in a couple of months
and beginning to analyze the data to figure out ways to refine the app
Authorities intend to launch a campaign on social and other media to encourage
more people to use the app, Jacob said, adding that the details have yet to be
worked out.
Street Bump, which cost a total of $45,000 from Boston
city coffers and insurer Liberty Mutual Group Inc. to develop the prototype and
award experts a prize to craft ways filter out false positives, was conceived
by Jacob's office and developed by Worcester Polytechnic Institute professor
Fabio Carrera, with help from a group he's working with at the Santa Fe
Complex, a community organization in New Mexico.
The first version collected lots of data but couldn't
differentiate between potholes and other bumps. So InnoCentive Inc., a Waltham,
Mass., crowdsourcing firm, threw the challenge out to a network of 400,000
experts and offered them a share of $25,000 in prize money donated by Liberty
Mutual.
In the end, ideas were incorporated from three places --
a group of hackers in Somerville, Mass., that promotes community education and
research; the head of the mathematics department at Grand Valley State
University in Allendale, Mich.; and a software engineer who did not want to be
identified.
There has been so much interest from other cities in the
U.S. and abroad that Boston is preparing to release the code to the public by
the end of the summer so others can tweak the software for their needs.
Proposals include using it for early detection of earthquakes and creating a
"black box" for police cruisers that could show whether a vehicle was
stationary or moving before a crash to stop people who hit parked police cars
from claiming officers crashed into them.
"I think people are really interested in the
concept," Jacob said. "Right now, the feedback we've gotten is ...
`Very interesting app, how do we use it in our city?"'
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