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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!
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.
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...
Simple, the city just waits until 500 people have hit the same pothole, and only then sends someone out to check.
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"
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.
Simple, the city just waits until 500 people have hit the same pothole, and only then sends someone out to check.
1. Put large hose or similar across road (in the middle of nowhere)
2. Wait for 500 cars to run over said hose
3. Remove hose
4. Watch confused road crew respond to "pothole"
5. Repeat
My webcomic
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
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 wanna boom boom boom with your body yo" "It's gonna be a bumpy ride" ;)
Wonder what the government will think about those potholes
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.
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
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.
.... 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
Oh noes, they would have wasted 10 minutes of their time before moving on to the pothole down the road. Sonovabitch.
-1 overrated isn't the same thing as "I disagree".
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.
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.