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Over 10,000 Problems Fixed In Detroit Thanks To Cellphone App (motorcitymuckraker.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Six months ago, Detroit's city officials launched a smartphone app called "Improve Detroit." The idea was to give residents a way to easily inform city hall of problems that needed to be fixed. For example: potholes, abandoned vehicles, broken hydrants and traffic lights, water leaks, and more. Since that time, over 10,000 issues have been fixed thanks to reports from that app. "Residents have long complained about city hall ignoring litter and broken utilities. But the app has provided a more transparent and direct approach to fixing problems." Perhaps most significant is its effect on the water supply: running water has been shut off to almost a thousand abandoned structures, and over 500 water main breaks have been located with the app's help. Crowd-sourced city improvement — imagine if apps like this become ubiquitous.
How is this any different than calling them up and telling them what is broken?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
All these ghetto folk be hitting up the police on their Obama phone, you feel me, complaining there ain't no mo money in Detroit, so they gonna bust a cap in some coppers ass, you feel me, we gotta bring back black power and all us niggas gotta take back da city, you know what I mean
Boston has had an app like this; it's called "Citizens Connect."
Essentially, it's a very half-assed ticketing system. You open a ticket, and that's it - you can't provide any further information, or challenge a request, or re-open it. There is only one action city worker can do - "close" the ticket. About the only thing they got right was not forcing people to select a category; a team of staffers handle that.
What people quickly discovered was that city workers would just close tickets, regardless of whether the work actually got done or not. So, what you saw increasingly were tickets that said "STOP CLOSING MY REQUESTS WITHOUT FIXING IT."
That said...it beats Cambridge, MA's system, which has horrendously poor geotagging and only accepts requests in a few limited, narrow issue categories.
I have three or four of these apps for the various cities I spend time in now. It's stupid. There is a national service set up, but cities don't like it because it provides a lot of reporting to the public. City workers don't like Joe Q Public seeing how long requests take to clear and stuff like that. Makes 'em look bad....
Please help metamoderate.
Is it possible for a city to have too much infrastructure? What would that look like, and is there an objective way to determine whether a city like Detroit has that problem?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Informing the Detroit city government what the problems are has never been the problem. Getting them to do something about it is the problem. The telephone worked just fine, it's that the city government either just doesn't care or is blatantly incompetent. Detroit, ruled by Democrats since 1962. A city whose Golden Age included the Purple Gang. Yeah, I think an app wasn't why their streets were full of potholes and the sidewalks were full of litter. Giving it credit for cleaning things up is typical journalistic thinking.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Raleigh, NC, uses SeeClickFix, supposedly.
One road issue I entered (with a picture) was just ignored until it aged out of the system. They're doing a city wide resurfacing program to address multiple road issues, but it would have been nice to get that response instead of Jack Squat.
I put another request in for tree servicing (as required by law) and nothing happened on it for three months. I finally called the city directly and the issue was taken care of within two days. Again, it would have been nice to be told "hey you need to call so-and-so" instead of having to hunt that down myself, since (I think) they advertised this application as the way to submit issues to them.
Someone has to be monitoring these apps or they are just useless to the citizens. They are, however, useful for a limited time to the City Council since people can vent into the void (the app), but that only works until people realize the app requests are ignored.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those that need closure
Which is now possible thanks to the technology of globalization...As opposed to 'representative democracy ' which is in fact a misnomer given the fact that over 90% of the polices passed by congress since the 1980s have been either to no benefit to the public or detrimental.
1) I don't want to be on hold.
2) The person on the other end of the phone may not be right person, I may need to be transferred.
3) The person may say they wrote it down, but didn't.
4) The person may say they wrote it down, but wrote it down wrong.
5) I may be told I called the wrong number.
6) The person may be out to lunch.
7) Voice mail could be full.
8) Voice mail might be wrong number with no human to tell me otherwise.
9) Automated systems, if they have one, are a major hassle listening to each option and consumes tons of time.
10) The office might be closed
11) It might be a holiday, weekend, etc.
Just because the Demicrats rule here doesn't mean that the Republican's aren't the ones behind the curtains pulling the strings. Republicans are the real rulers of Detroit and have been for more than 100 years.
Um. Is this your opinion because you know how well Republicans and Labor Unions "get along" (e.g. like matches and gasoline), or because of some other reason, like "Eat your broccoli Johnny, or the Republicans will come out of your closet and eat you while you're asleep"?
And by that I mean "Bankrupted by corrupt one-party machine politics, deindustrialization, and overly generous union pensions, and where the police can no longer afford to light up streetlights or to investigate any but the most serious crimes.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
But the Republican's thugs in blue are the Republican's thugs in blue.
Pretty sure you're wrong... the Omni Consumer Products cops uniforms were actually black.
So did they shut off the water to the buildings... because it was wasting water, or because there were squatters living in the buildings, and they wanted to render them uninhabitable, instead of providing city services in the area?
Detroit gets real winters. Abandoned buildings aren't heated. Freezing water expands and breaks pipes. Now the building has structural damage in addition to wasting clean water. This is a win for everyone, including the squatters who won't be living with mold or falling through water-damaged floors. It's easy to bring in water in jugs and any drains will still work. You can even make the toilets work. Annoying, sure, but hardly uninhabitable.
We've had this in major cities in Denmark for years. Really nice: spots vandalism or a broken light. Fire up the app. Take a photo. The app logs GPS and gives option to move found position on map. Add optional comment and press send. Then the app keeps track of ticket status.
Other stuff we've had for years includes sms/app based mobile payment between individuals and stores. Sms/app based purchase of stamps when sending letters. Tickets for train/bus. Etc.
Slashdot.org has really become a blast from the past :-)
It provides more information publicly, so the results are easier to manipulate to justify spending less on public works. At least they need to keep the website running.
The open source alternative would be https://www.fixmystreet.com/ It got many forks on github for other countries, and it was first made by mysociety in the UK. Currently that version is used in 8 countries.
10,000 fixed, 100,000,000 to go!
I'd not thought about winder freezing pipes. I've actually had it happen when an upstairs tenant in an office building turned down the heat for the weekend, and pipes in the hot water heating system broke.
When I was a courier, I used to call the DOT to report malfunctioning traffic lights. This meant I had to figure out which intersection I just went through, which direction I went through it and which light was out. I would gladly have left the app running on my phone so that all I had to do was push a report button and state the issue and push a send button.
so now they've got 99 problems, but a breech aint one.
Locally, we use http://www.seeclickfix.com/.
The smart-phone app makes reporting problems easy, allowing the inclusion of not just descriptions, but GPS coordinates and photos along with follow-up. I find it very useful and I'm sure that makes is easy for crew to actually locate the problems
The thing that makes it work so well is that there is a designated person in the city managers' office that coordinates the distribution of issues and follows up and has the authority of the city manager behind them. Otherwise, I believe the project would fail.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YSp2KGMQEk8
That's great. Too bad Detroit has millions of other problems. I hope there is an app for that.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Then they are using the wrong technology.
They should have cold temperature relief valves, and use PEX piping, so that it can freeze without damage. The building itself should be equipped with an excessive flow shut-off valve, such as the Dorot 100FE (which is an entirely mechanical design, mediated by water pressure differential over time).
Then they could leave the water on, and not have a problem.
BTW: if they had excessive flow shut-off valves throughout the system, the broken water lines would never have risen to the level of a problem in the first place; the first they would have heard about it would have been complaints of not water.
The reason that a fire hydrant doesn't freeze is that there's no water in it; it's called an "anti-siphon valve" and it's located below the frost line. When water is shut off, the valve drains the water out of the plug; the same thing should be employed in structures so that when the excessive flow cut-off triggers, the water drains out of the system, and it's protected against freezing.
You could literally abandon a properly equipped building for yeas, it'd get close to the freeze point, and the entire plumbing system would protect itself.
Such systems are common in areas where a power failure could result in a loss of heating; I've seen them used in Utah, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Minnesota, and Wisconsin (among others) for apartment complexes and horse stables. You'd think that Detroit, having so many mechanical engineers at one point, would have adopted this into their building code already.
The most important part of this system is the issue tracking feedback, as it provides positive reinforcement to the reporting party, and it provides incentive to not just blow off the report to the city.
Systems such as this, but without the feedback loop, exist in many cities; without the feedback loop, there's no way to detect the difference between an ignored report and one which is scheduled for a fix (including a "cable TV guy" style estimate as to when).
Chicago has an app too. http://www.chicagoworksapp.com... Their 311 dial-a-problem service will also send you updates via SMS.
Many, if not all, dutch municipalities have had this for years. I still remember when slashdot was news for nerd but the memory is fading quickly:p
0x or or snor perron?!
A phone call is not recorded, it can be ignored or forgotten. Logging the complaint means that it stays on a list and doesn't fall through the cracks. At least in theory. A fair question would have been how many water leaks and such were found before the app to see if the stats actually improved.
Because it also helps them to help you better and because there's more than just you and you are a part of a whole who has done nothing by themselves, ever. Not only that, you'll do nothing by yourself. Ever. Even though you're a miserable failure you're still left alive at the grace of others.
Please, don't try to explain that you're a libertarian (you're not and wouldn't actually know the first thing about our platform). You're a petulant and selfish child with no experience that has never experienced success. In short, you're a pathetic human being who deserves to be physically punished because there's little hope of you actually understanding anything but violence.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
.... like the real problem was that people weren't reporting the problems and the app just encouraged people to do so.
Sell it to Canada.
That's earned compensation agreed to in a contract, you worker-hating fascist, you.
That's one of the "neat" tricks of neoliberalism: cut taxes on the rich, gut the standard of living for the working class, then blame the victims for the results.
Boston's system does not show a flow through the system, because there is no system. Every department in the city has its own computer system, and it appears they've refused to unify them or link them together.
Essentially, your ticket with CC is closed when it gets entered into a department's worklog. Whether it actually gets done or not, you have no idea.
Please help metamoderate.