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

[intellitech]

Not even necessary! Most people in my town report potholes to the municipality, all they need to do is LISTEN and FIX THEM.

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 ?

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

[jonbryce]

Yes. www.fixmystreet.com in the UK.

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

[oneiros27]

As a municipal elected official ...

We fix our streets. The problem is, we have a state highway running through the town (Main Street), and we have a number of county roads, too.

About 90% of the complaints are about the county roads, as there's a stretch of road that was supposed to have been resurfaced 2-3 years ago, and they still haven't done it; they replaced a section out last year (during rush hour), and they're supposed to replace out another section or two this year where the potholes are particularly bad. ... but they're not maintaining their roads, and when we report potholes to them, they take anywhere from a week to a month to do something; in some cases, they keep calling for an address of where "the" pothole is, and we have to explain it's not just one pothole, there's a dozen in less than a block, and when they finally come out, they patch *one* of the holes, so we have to keep calling and pestering them for them to fix one at a time.

And also, if they're in Maryland -- the state last year cut the state funding to municipalities for road maintenance by 90%, but they didn't make the cuts until after the municipalities were required to have passed their budget. (and state police aid was also cut significantly), so it's possible that they just don't have the money to do it.

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

and how does it differentiate between potholes and, say, old people?

Re:swerves?

[mysidia]

Yes... this is probably really about detecting people texting while driving.

If you have the app on your phone, and you pick your phone up while moving to start typing your text message, the phone will detect you have lifted it while driving; and immediately use satellite/GPS to determine your position, transmit the alert to the local authorities together with your phone's front-facing camera output.

As police are homing in on your position, the facial recognition software will match your face and alert them to the make and model of your car, and they'll bust the driver for texting

Re:swerves?

[commlinx]

I agree this smells of a developer that thinks they've come up with a great innovation that won't work in practice. I've used accelerometers in vehicle / equipment monitoring applications and unless the mechanical bonding is solid and/or known the results are practically useless. Especially with a phone where having it in your pocket while you adjust sitting position and any other number of things will possibly have a similar acceleration profile to hitting a pot hole.

They'd probably be better having a way to report things from a menu, then you could cover things like traffic lights out and other general traffic hazzards. Anyone that cared enough to run the app probably wouldn't mind pulling over in a safe spot, adjusting back the position from their current position and submitting a report. You could assign a "karma" to each user account to help prioritize and sift out asshats, and it would also remove any privacy concerns.

Re:swerves?

[cpt kangarooski]

No, this is for detecting potholes in Boston. Most of the swerves will be for other reasons, or no reason at all.

Re:swerves?

[c0lo]

and how does it differentiate between potholes and, say, old people?

How to put it in layman terms? The potholes are... well... holes. The old people are... more like speed-bumps.
The accelerometers will show if the car went down-up or up-down... If the car stops immediately after, in the first case they'll send the towing truck, in the later they'll send an ambulance.

Re:swerves?

[sumdumass]

Oh noess.. the phone was upside down.. Now the government thinks I ran over old people.

Think about that.. seriously.

Re:swerves?

[bronney]

and if the car went left right left right A B start, you has 1up!

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:swerves?

[scrib]

It's late, so pardon me taking you TOO seriously, but the phone, in any orientation, knows which way "down" is. See, there's this force called "gravity" which acts exactly like accelerating away from the center of the earth. It's how phones know which way you have 'em oriented. If the measured acceleration sharply lessens then increases then you are dipping into a pothole. If the acceleration is the other way around, you've run over a... speed bump.

If the app's voice recognition software catches you saying "oh shit, do you think anyone saw that" they know to send the police.

Re:swerves?

[somersault]

See, there's this force called "gravity" which acts exactly like accelerating away from the center of the earth.

Really? I was under the impression that gravity was accelerating me towards the center of the earth. At least, when I jump, I seem to come back down again. Maybe I'm standing upside down.

Re:swerves?

[smellsofbikes]

I agree a single-point pothole detector, using an iphone in someone's pocket, is useless. However, consider that if you were getting a stream of data from thousands, you could correlate their position/sensor readings, and then you might get *some* signal out of all the noise. I'm still dubious it's going to work well, but with enough sensors and enough time it is at least possible.

Headline of the future

[mentil]

Government program undermined by Lowriders.

Is this how low the bar has dropped?

[flatulus]

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!

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.

Re:Is this how low the bar has dropped?

[yeshuawatso]

Speeding is the same conclusion I came up with. I could see the next headline "Gov uses app to catch speeders reporting pot holes." Of course, this could be a good thing too. The app data may be able to capture where people speed the most and setup speed traps, especially if people are speeding in dangerous areas such as school zones. Other possible good uses include identifying street congestion that hasn't been reported, most commonly used routes for road improvements, and most common reroutes and side streets to keep an eye out on areas that will need expansion soon. Really a mixed bag of good and evil.

Re:How exactly does it work?

[flatulus]

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?

Correlation. Any single "bump" - not interesting. A dozen or so "bumps" with the same lat/long: Send an inspector to that location. Good chance you'll find a pothole (or a dead body) in the road....

Here comes automated speeding tickets...

[ibsteve2u]

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.

Easy to develop because it doesn't do anything

[makubesu]

Why bother actually collecting the data if you never intend to fix the pot holes?

Re:How exactly does it work?

[Ynot_82]

Exactly,
and how do they know you're driving?

Local jogging club causes 10 miles of road to be dug up

In the monitoring station...

[abednegoyulo]

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!

Re:Okay.. so you know where a pothole is within 50

[bieber]

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...

what's the point?

[noahm]

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!

Re:what's the point?

[cpt kangarooski]

Problem is, nobody lives in Boston. Most people live in Cambridge, Somerville, Newton, Brighton, etc, etc.

While most of the people in the Metro Boston area don't live in Boston itself, Boston is nevertheless the most populous city in New England. The next-most-populous city in the metro area is Cambridge, and it's only about 1/5th the population of Boston.

Also, Brighton has been part of Boston since the 1870s.

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.

DCR mainly only runs the parkways, which admittedly are some pretty major roads. But most of the roads in the city don't fall under DCR; the city's own Department of Public Works maintains them. Or that's the hope, at least.

Re:Okay.. so you know where a pothole is within 50

[zero0ne]

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.

Re:How exactly does it work?

[blackest_k]

not seen many people jogging at 20-30 mph +