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Gov App Detects Potholes As Your Drive Over Them
An anonymous reader writes "The City of Boston has released an app that uses the accelerometer in your smartphone to automatically report bumps in the road as you drive over them. From the article: 'The application relies on two components embedded in iPhones, Android phones, and many other mobile devices: the accelerometer and the Global Positioning System receiver. The accelerometer, which determines the direction and acceleration of a phone’s movement, can be harnessed to identify when a phone resting on a dashboard or in a cupholder in a moving car has hit a bump; the GPS receiver can determine by satellite just where that bump is located.' I am certain that this will not be used to track your movements, unless they are vertical."
There are plenty of city workers with city-issued phones to find all the potholes. Take off the tinfoil hat.
Of course the purpose of this is to find all the potholes to the city workers can avoid them on the way home - and maybe make a nice graphical pothole zonemap for the city website. Actual road crews probably won't have access to the information.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
does it log when you very slightly swerve to avoid a big pothole?
like most people do?
i guess if it's REALLY big you couldn't avoid hitting it.
1) Distribute pothole detection app to citizens.
2) Observe network overload when they all drive down Wilshire Blvd. at rush hour.
3) ???
4) Profit!
I can't help but sound stupid, but how exactly can it detect when you've driven over a pot hole or are just shaking your phone up and down? Isn't this what road surveyors are for in the first place?
Government program undermined by Lowriders.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I can see hundreds (nay, thousands) of people signing up to participate in this, thinking "how cool!" All the time the city builds gigabytes of records of where the subscribers were (in the latitude/longitude sense) and who knows, maybe the next step in the plan is to issue speeding tickets based on the GPS telemetry.
Cellphones are the work of SATAN, I tell you!
If past performance is any indication of future results, about 1/10th of the time, my potholes will show as being on the front lawn of the persons house on that street... Assuming it actually gets the street right at all, and doesn't mark me as being in the lake like it does time to time.
The most accurate I've seen is 47 meters but often my phone is 1500 meters off.
At times, when using google maps, I'm driving somewhere a half a mile off the road until it snaps back on.
I wish it were more accurate.
Oh and get this...
It reports my location like (this is not my actual location hackers)
21.7324
-92.7823
within 450 meters.
LOL. 4 digit precision... within 450 meters..
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
How on earth do you determine what caused a phone to move?
If you knock your phone into the passenger footwell reaching for your cigarrettes, are the council going to come next day and tear your road up?
I am certain that this will not be used to track your movements, unless they are vertical.
So it doesn't log which potholes you run over? Sorry, I'm not particularly afraid of having my movements tracked, but I'm trying to make sense of the quoted sentence...
Trailer trash better turn them off Friday evenings
They just intentionally place two "minor" speed bumps (literally) in the road, and when your GPS tells 'em you're on the road, the timing between the bumps tells 'em you're speeding, and they send you a ticket. A failure to pay same then results in the app telling the nearest police car that you're passing by. Nifty.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
That is so cool, unlike here it takes days, weeks, and sometimes months before the government decide to close a small potholes. Sometimes they just pour in some white cement and it only last 2 or 3 days before start cracking up, where this only happen after the hole is out on the local newspaper.
Why bother actually collecting the data if you never intend to fix the pot holes?
Guy1: Hey WTF is going on here? We are detecting a lot of bumps in a very secluded area.
Guy2: So?
Guy1: The vehicles seems to be not moving.
Guy2: Ah! Valentines day!
Presumably, a single report would never be used to identify a pothole, as that could easily be a fluke (maybe the user dropped their phone while driving through the area). Rather, you would want to wait until you'd gotten a reasonable number of reports from the same area to ensure that there actually is a pothole in the road; a convenient consequence of this would be that you could average the responses from that area, which should go a long way towards correcting for GPS inaccuracy. At very least it should be good enough that a city worker could find the pothole in the course of a couple minutes driving around...
Oh, shoot! If I participate with this program, won't be able to fornicate while I drive. Else Big Brother is gonna think the city is more pockmarked than the moon!!
LOL. 4 digit precision... within 450 meters..
You might want to double-check your calculation. A minute of longitude at the equator is equal to 1 nautical mile or 1852 meters. For a rought calc if you assumed there were 100 minutes in a degree instead of 60 you'd still have two decimals left making it around 18 meters of precisions. Rule of thumb is 4 decimals equates to around 10 meters.
For the last several weeks, city workers have been attempting to fill an unexplained rash of apparently-invisible pot holes on Lovers' Lane.
"I don't get it," said Area Supervisor Ed Jamacated. "From the readings we've been getting, it should look like the Grand Canyon around here."
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Sounds to me like just another way for the government to track the movements of average citizens. Go fuck yourself, government.
I lived in metro-Boston for a long time (I moved away about a year ago), and my only question about this whole project is, "why?" The Mass DCR (Dept of Conservation & Resources) is legally free of any liability for damage to cars due to road disrepair, and it is clearly evident. Potholes deep enough to cause severe damage are common, and unless the DCR staff goes out of its way to avoid ever driving, there's no way they could be unaware of these. (That's hard to imagine, since the only organization more poorly run in the entire Boston area is the MBTA, operator of the public transit system.) You don't need a GPS to find the potholes, you just get in your car and drive, they'll find you. Just watch out when they do!
I suppose, in fairness, that this article is only referring to Boston proper, not the greater Boston area. Problem is, nobody lives in Boston. Most people live in Cambridge, Somerville, Newton, Brighton, etc, etc. Maybe the roads in Boston will be great because of this, but everybody's car will be so trashed by the time they get there that it won't matter.
Gah. The SF Bay Area is fucked, but this really makes me not miss Boston!
At first I thought that said Potheads and was like, do we really need an App for that? They're not that difficult to pick out.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
Technology evolves, and as the reality of "flood-up/trickle-down" economics - the reality that the only thing that trickles down is pain - becomes ever more evident in ever more desperate state and local governments...
For instance, triangulation and transmission delays from cell phone towers in combination with GPS data could be used immediately to narrow down location, and privacy concerns? Heck, they just stick that label of the system is necessary to apprehend fleeing terrorists, and then soon enough it will bleed into the privacy of the individual American..coerced, perhaps, by communities desperate to fund their police forces with traffic offenses.
I wouldn't rule anything out...like, I never thought my government would lie my country into invading another nation, and then lie about the "Six days, six weeks, I doubt six months..." duration to protect some tax cuts from the application of basic math, and then lie about the need for more troops and so delay a surge until a critical Presidential election had passed, and then lie about stuffing key government departments with people chosen on the basis of their ideology, and then lie...
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
I think that that is the GPs point - that the device reports more digits than can be remotely accurate.
why do I see reports coming in from the local "make out point"?
Sounds like your phone is using the cell tower for location instead of the GPS chip.
Civilian GPS should provide a worst case accuracy of ~8 meters at a 95% confidence level.
Then the City's gonna be looking for a lot of potholes at yo momma's house.
And there are potholes. But not as bad as you make it seem. At least compared other Cities that get a good amount of snow. New York and Pittsburgh are two that come to mind. I'm not saying it isn't a problem, but I just want to make it clear to people who are not familiar with the area. I've never once gotten damage from a pothole severe or otherwise. It happens, but I've only heard of it once or twice second hand.
An app for that? I'll whole-heartedly agree with you there. I don't see a reason for that.
Just monitor police cars and garbage trucks. They tend to cover most streets every few days.
I'd actually WELCOME more potholes in Boston. Maybe it would slow some of those crazies down!
So are they encouraging people to actually drive into potholes and potentially damage their vehicle? I've never met someone who, when seeing a pothole, didn't move slightly in either direction to avoid it.
Interesting idea, but practicality says it's not going to work very well.
I think that what you are missing is that they would not react to single data points but groupings of data points. For example, the road crew won't roll until there have been more than, lets say, 50 hits in the same position or area. As you have pointed out, a single data point could be anything. A large number of data points forms a pattern.
David
"I wanna boom boom boom with your body yo" "It's gonna be a bumpy ride" ;)
Wonder what the government will think about those potholes
Hey as if the services don't know where they have potholes! They have workers, cameras, etc. And what if it is not a pothole? Absurd! And another quetion arises - what is the real reason for the app?
Katerina from ipad application design
I read that as Gov App Detects Potatoes As Your Drive Over Them
Think about it. The results would obviously be rather useless if it was in your shirt pocket, but if it's in the console or on the seat, you don't need to do any fancy up-then-down-then-blah characterization. Just have the software monitor the vibrations from normal road noise and isolate spikes in the pattern. You don't have to know the pattern ahead of time. Let the software decide what the noise floor is based on the aggregate data it's seeing over X seconds, then watch for the abnormals. Even if you get the occasional person bumping it or picking it up or running over the bumps in the middle of the road, when the "home office" processing software does the mass data analysis, it will weed out the flyers and only identify the spikes that show up consistently. They don't have to know what kind of bump it is, just that there is a bump in the road that is bad enough to show up at a consistent rate and that would trigger an inspection to find out if it's expected (train tracks) or unexpected (pothole/buckling/etc.).
It doesn't have to be perfect: just good enough to identify the bad areas. Even if it was horrendously inaccurate, an automated system that was nearly free and got 30% right would be better than waiting on people to call in reports with erroneous or hard-to-understand data.
You are obviously not using a GPS so why is this relevant? The figures you cite sound like cell tower positioning.
Actual GPS results will easily be in the usable accuracy range -- the odd outliers won't matter as the data will be used in statistical analysis anway: only massive clusters of pothole locations will actually trigger an action.
That doesn't hold true once you get into the urban jungle, or essentially any location where you do not have a clear view of a large portion of the sky.
This, incidentally, is the case in quite a lot of metros in the US.
First, this app has to be running in the background. iOS apps stay in the background for some time but iOS will eventually quit the application to free up resources for other apps. No one is going to voluntarily open this app before they leave for work just to check for potholes. It also has to use data on a limited data plan. Finally a background app has to reduce some battery life to report back home. I don't see this being all that ingenious as it sounds just because of iOS limitations and limitations in general of smartphones.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Suddenly the red-light district of any city is going to have the nicest streets, because of so much 'sudden vertical movement' being reported there day after day.
I can't imagine the street workers (on either side) are going to mind.
-Styopa
1. The pothole database will make it possible to track the user crossing his "pothole history" with the known "pothole geography" database, and extracting a correlation. Peasy.
2. Cessation of signal means the impact broke the phone. Or the car fell in the "pothole".
3. This will enable them to prosecute "pothole vigilantes", who fill up potholes on their own, when the state is passive.
Why not have robotic pothole-fillers ? Could be ... "interesting" :)
"Pothole-Minators" ?
There are many streets in Medford that are "unplowable" due to the deplorable condition of the asphalt. Tough luck to you if you live on one of those streets.
The potholes don't slow them down at all. Ever wonder why so many boston cars have dents? Its because they are swerving to avoid potholes.
If enough people have it, you can focus on areas where 10 people "bumped" at exactly the same place and throw out everything else. Running over grandma in peace you will do...
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Not to mention this is on a road. So it's basically 10 meters in a linear direction not a radius. An inspector can easily find the pothole within a 10 meter stretch of road.
How about logging your trip to the dealer/garage immediately afterward to fix the damages when you don't swerve in time? (Yes, I just had a $500 pothole event yesterday).
.... or your servers will be a heap of smouldering slag after the first morning rush over the Triborough bridge!
I think you missed my point.
The reported accuracy (4 digits) is less than the actual accuracy (within 450 meters).
So it gives two highly accurate numbers... which are only accurate to within 450 meters. It might as well say, "you are at 21.23, -92.71"
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Does the iphone 3g have an actual GPS?
Does the iphone 4g have an actual GPS?
I'm using mine with the default settings. Is there a way to turn on the real GPS vs the cell phone tower GPS?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Well this is an app for a cell phone right (presumably the iphone).
iPhone GPS (even aGPS) accuracy varies wildly. In the city it can get confused.
Perhaps I don't have it turned on and it is only using cell phone towers but I read that getting confused in the city is common because of reflections off buildings. I don't see any settings to "turn on real GPS".
95% is not 100%... but what I see isn't 95%. The best it's ever reported was 17 meters and that is rare. 45 meters is much more common. 450 meters is common and 1500 meters occurs at least a few times a day.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Drive your car over a pothole, break the suspension and sue the relevant local authority.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You're going to let the government know everywhere you were and how fast you were speeding on your way there ? The least obnoxious result is that the speeding fine notifications will probably just pop automatically into your inbox. No need for a judge, you just convicted yourself out of you own mouth so to speak.
Investigator: "Then tell me, Mr. Jones, why does that bump profile resemble your mother-in-law's face? Twice even; one forward and one backward."
Table-ized A.I.
Catch! Here is my smartphone.
Oops! New China Syndrome Hole at 24th and Southwest.
Hey!
That was my thesis project back in 2008!
http://bachear.sourceforge.net/
Gimme credit!
This is the same thing as my Thesis from 2008.
Look for bachear project at sourceforge:
About this project:
This is the Bachear project ("bachear")
This project was registered on SourceForge.net on Aug 28, 2008, and is described by the project team as follows:
Analyzing the signal from an accelerometer combined with GPS data is possible to automatically create a map showing the street defects.
So the smartphone can report only vertical acceleration because it knows its 3 dimensional orientation?
So all it needs to do is to correlate position of two[1] GPS that are extremely close, and one (or more) is doing up and down movements? [1] ok, more, if you want to locate an orgy. Software patent for new application, anyone?
How about an app that puts 'You' in the right place when someone typos 'your'?
K.
That was his point... sarcastic laughter at over-precise numerical specification when a 450m range of error was present.
I have proposed this idea to Boston and I am awaiting their response. Maybe everyone here can request Boston to participate if they like what I am proposing. The reports would be emailed to Boston every time someone sends in a report. Also, the system can even email different contacts in different cities or different counties. So it actually works nationwide anywhere.
Pothole Alert App
Use your iPhone or Android phone to report potholes using GPS.
iPhone :
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pothole-alert/id404126454?mt=8
Android:
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.shake
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