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."

Comments

They don't have to put the app in your phone

[symbolset]

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.

Re:They don't have to put the app in your phone

[Yvanhoe]

I always thought every municipality should have something like a bug tracking system that citizens could use. Does anyone know if some administrations ever tried that ?

swerves?

[mug funky]

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.

Re:swerves?

[thegarbz]

The acceleration profile for a pot hole being hit would easily be compared to both current speed and position

Let me tell you there is absolutely NOTHING easy about characterizing a system mass, spring, damper, damper (yes 2), with not only unknown but variable mass spring dampers even when you know a very rough approximation of what the impact velocity is, and I say rough because GPS doesn't give you an instant speed and people have a tendency to swerve, slowdown and do other strange reactions when there's obstructions on the road.

Just of the top of my head the things that will mask your signal:
Unknown speed,
Unknown mass of the car,
Unknown rim size and unknown tire pressure giving you an unknown dampening reaction to the bump,
Unknown shock absorber stiffness, and
Unknown coupling between the dashboard and the phone (how soft or hard is your dashboard), as well as angle of the phone on the dash.

With so many unknowns it is impossible to characterise a bump of a pothole from any of the other things that may happen. Was that a minor pothole or did the guy just drive over the lane reflector?

Re:Is this how low the bar has dropped?

[Zouden]

You're suggesting they will encourage people to use their phones to report potholes, and then issue speeding fines using the collected data? I'm sure that'll really encourage participation in the program.

The government has more efficient ways of oppressing you than asking you to opt-in to a pothole-reporting system. Put down the tinfoil hat.