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.

Comments

What?

[ArchieBunker]

How is this any different than calling them up and telling them what is broken?

Re:What?

[fisted]

Because it is an app. Like, the future! Also very cyber.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who calls anyone?

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

FTFA:
“It saves time, it gets results, and I love how I can follow the progress being made on the complaint,” said Dan Wroblewski, who lives on Detroit’s far west side and uses the app to report issues while patrolling his neighborhood.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to wait for ppl to answer the phone, you have to call during office hours, they can ignore your complaint, it is difficult to track the progress..
It's like saying why do you need an app to bank when you can just call the bank...

Re:What?

[gman003]

Automatically goes into an issue-tracking system, instead of needing to be manually entered. Cutting out the person on the other end makes things faster, and lets more of the budget be put to fixing problems instead of overhead.

There may be other, lesser advantages. It could let them provide photos or GPS coordinates, or have an easier follow-up process to make sure the problem was actually fixed.

Re:What?

[Hadlock]

You get to skip the phone tree system, the hold music, the condescending tone of the person on the other side. You also get more accurate location information, and the whole system is routed directly in to an electronic ticketing system - no paper TPS reports required!

Re:What?

[fragMasterFlash]

How is this any different than calling them up and telling them what is broken?

Thank you for calling the City of Detroit. Para obtener instrucciones en español por favor presione 1 ahora. Your call is very important to us. Due to the current high volume of calls it will be approximately NINETY-ONE minutes until a representative is available to take your call. To leave your phone number for a call back instead press 3 now,

Re:What?

[elal1862]

And spend 10 minutes on hold, having to explain the situation to some dime-a-dozen call center serf who's not competent for the job and unfamilliar with the neighborhood...

Re:What?

[radarskiy]

The phone's camera and GPS mean you don't have to depend on the user to verbally describe the problem and location.

Re: What?

[fustakrakich]

but they're moderate republicans. They have to run as democrats now. The extremists chased them out of the GOP

Re:What?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Fundamentally? Not at all. In terms of convenience? The fancy tech toys presumably make it fairly trivial to construct a nice machine-readable trouble ticket, with GPS coordinates, user submitted text, pictures, etc. that drops right into the trouble ticket without needing anyone to man the phone; or depending on their ability to reliably interpret and record what the caller is reporting, write it up, and send it to the appropriate person.

Given that the input is still coming from people, I suspect that you can't automate all the labor out of cleaning it up(if there is a way for data you attempt to collect about the world to be messy and intractable, it will find it; and even if you think that there isn't, it might just invent one...); but there's a lot to be said for cutting out tedious, error-prone, steps, especially once you are dealing with a system large enough that providing 'the personal touch' simply isn't possible. These sorts of systems can be somewhat prone to being impersonal or inflexible(especially if the implementation tries to use a bunch of drop-down options to shove you through the decision tree and your problem is some flavor of 'other' that they don't provide for); but if the userbase is large enough that you'd need a call center to do it with humans, you don't really have the option of interpersonal familiarity; so you might as well go for efficiency.

If this were Ye Olde Smalle Towne, where you could just ring up the mayor's office and the kindly secretary who has been there forever and knows everybody would pick up and you could tell her about it, the 'app' thing would be a pointless gimmick; but that's not exactly the scope of the problem here.

Re:What?

[Dr_Barnowl]

An operator costs money and is easily occupied. A ticket system can take multiple requests simultaneously and saves money on a real person that can be spent on fixing the problems instead.

Re:What?

[swb]

In Minneapolis we have a "311" system which is supposed to serve a similar purpose -- report potholes, etc. I was just thinking how much better it would be if I could go stand right on top of this one pothole and get the GPS coordinates of it and send in a picture of it.

Re:What?

[Joe Haskins]

gman003 is correct on all counts. Photos and GPS coordinates make it easier for the workers to find the problem (some, but certainly not all, of the workers aren't very motivated & don't exactly look hard). It also allows anyone to see tickets, comment on them, or even reopen closed tickets. If something gets marked as resolved when it wasn't, any citizen can reopen that ticket and add a comment saying that is wasn't done.

Years ago, Detroit has a 311 system that was supposed to track complaints and give you a ticket number. Besides the obvious disadvantages of the phone system, a number of city departments did not participate so you never knew who to call. If you had to call the department directly, it wasn't always immediately obvious what number to call to report a problem and there was zero accountability.

As Dan mentioned in the article, the app does get results. The resolution times can vary depending on what type of issue it is and what department handles that. I've seen dumping issues take up to a week to get someone out to investigate but I've also seen pothole issues resolved within a couple days (previous response time was often measured in months if you were lucky).

I don't know how true it is, but I've also been told that the mayor watches the system and uses it to hold department heads accountable. I do know if something does go unresolved for a long time, I have proof that I can take to my city council member. Even though the departments don't technically report to the city council, getting a call from a council member's office does seem to motivate them.

Re:What?

[AmiMoJo]

I want an app that uses my phone's accelerometer to report problems with the road surface automatically. Combining reports over time and a number of users to get rid of false positives.

Re:What?

[hey!]

How is this any different than calling them up and telling them what is broken?

I can answer that. I've had a lot of experience fixing up information flows in public agencies. The difference is in what happens to the information in your call once it's in the hands of the agency. It often falls into an irrationally complex morass of criss-crossing processes. Watching a government or non-profit organization respond to a new piece of information can be like watching an individual pachinko ball drop through the machine's forest of pins, only you can be sure that it will eventually drop into the right slot, the question is will it make it there in time? The morass into which your request falls isn't designed; it has evolved, and chances are nobody has ever had the job of seeing whether what it has evolved into makes any sense -- until a new system is planned.

One way to think about an organization is to compare it to the best organizations of that kind. And the best governmental organizations excel at performing routine tasks. None that I have ever seen excel at reinventing themselves; that takes the introduction of an outside force. It also takes the eyes of an an outsider with a knack for seeing which processes generate value and which processes simply support other processes. That's not always clear. I've had clients, with a simultaneously smug and hopeless air, hand me a fat ream of "critical reports" that a system absolutely had to generate. The first time this happened I was alarmed given my slim budget, but I quickly learned to ask this question: which of these "reports" do you actually use to make decisions with? Inevitably causes the ream of "reports" to slim down to a half dozen or so.

But if the hundred or so other things in that stack aren't things the organization uses to make decisions with, then what are they and why are they produced? Inevitably the answer is that they're produced to carry data from one process to another -- something that a computer system can do without any marginal input of labor. That means that upwards of 90% of the office work can be eliminated.

The result of eliminating that work isn't (as is often feared) that jobs disappear; it's that the organization becomes orders of magnitude more responsive. I've worked with mosquito control agencies that went from sending an inspector out days or weeks after the report of a problem (by which time it is certainly past) to sending out an inspector the same day and if necessary a spray truck that very night. I've worked with non-profits where donations took weeks or months to be deposited go to depositing the check and sending out the thank you letter the very same day. It's not hard to be responsive when you have a system that gets the right information to the right person immediately; it's impossible when your systems take weeks to get you information you need right away.

How do things get that bad? Not because you have bad people. You start with inexperienced people who learn how to do their jobs from the people who came before them; and since nobody has a full view of the entire system they come to see their job as keeping the system running more or less as it has been. That's not because they're bad or stupid; it's the best anyone can do under the circumstances. When there's was a problem in their part of the system the do their best to patch that part so the problem goes away.

Experienced programmers will recognize this anti-pattern; it's called "lava flow". Eventually the system becomes more patch than productive process and the effort to keep it running approaches or exceeds the effort spent on doing things that are intrinsically valuable.

So yes, I absolutely believe installing a system, particular a system with mobile data input, can have a massive impact on a public agency's responsiveness. I've seen it happen repeatedly. Imagine you're in charge of dispatching workers to deal with problems, but all you hav

Re:What?

[luis_a_espinal]

How is this any different than calling them up and telling them what is broken?

We could say the same about people using amazon.com for shopping instead of calling a telemarketer or, snail-mailing a purchase form tore up from one of those Sears shopping magazines of old.

Voice calls are not parseable or amenable for categorization. They are certainly not traceable from root cause/complaint to action teams. You can't autonomously prioritize.

Form data is. Welcome to the world of automation.

Re:What?

[Dereck1701]

Problem ticket tracking, this should of course also happen with phone calls but often doesn't. When you note an issue in an app by necessity it creates a database entry, that database entry has to be checked "fixed" by someone and in most systems that persons ID is logged by the system, so it creates a "paper trail" and a query-able list of what has been fixed, by who, and what is yet to be fixed. Don't do your job, or worse say you did without doing it and there is a trail that leads right back to you with your boss/the mayor breathing down your neck. Often because these systems are expensive ($100k on up for even a smaller city) they are used for far more than just complaint tracking, they are used for city wide asset management such as manhole, water valve, pipeline, address, fire hydrant, etc location information.

Re:What?

[swb]

I'm not sure how easy it would be to normalize different vehicle suspensions. You'd have to have some kind of test road with a known surface quality that the car could be driven on the calibrate the app to the car.

I'd like to see municipal vehicles and maybe buses equipped with scanners that could map the actual road surface.

Re:What?

[v1]

well-said. wish i had some mod pts to give you. looks like you're in the ideal position to comment on this issue.

One thing I haven't seen addressed here is the possibility of combining tickets. I've worked help desks in several places before and used different ticket tracking systems. Most of them had the ability to take automated entries, either generated via a service desk web page or just from sending an email to the service@ address. Obviously the heuristics of filing/assigning the ticket were poor with the email route, but the online ones usually work pretty good.

The customer gets to enter in a brief description of the problem, then the form attempts to auto fill the fields. The user then has the opportunity to correct fields that were incorrectly selected.

In the end none of these systems combined tickets (that's tough for a compiuter to do) but they always sent the user a link they could click on to check ticket status. Only about 15% of users actually took advantage of this, but if you get someone that's getting upset over our response time, sitting down with them for a few minutes and training them on it (really doesn't require training, more of a hand-hold) that usually calms them right down. "no your request wasn't thrown away, yes we are still aware of the problem, no it hasn't been fixed yet, yes the right person has been informed, yes you will hear back from us when it's resolved."

Combining tickets was always a manual process. One place when I started I had over 100 tickets in the system, many of which were months old. Users would just enter a new ticket every few weeks (or days!) if they didn't physically see a problem get fixed. (did not check ticket status, maybe it can't be fixed, or we need more information than "it doesn't WORK!", etc) I spent the first few days simply combing over the list repeatedly, combining entries. Some tickets were in the system as many as 13 times, by three people. That makes the tickets a lot more manageable. It also has the effect of letting you know how many people a problem is affecting.

One improvement I didn't see was the ability for a user to look in the ticket system, FIND an open ticket for the problem they were having, and allow them to either (A) add notes, or (B) click a "ME TOO" button to add a counter to let the staff know it was affecting more people and should get higher priority. But given the average user's low ambition to even look at the status of their own tickets, sadly, this very useful feature would probably be very difficult to get into any reasonably high usage. People would much rather take the laziest approach and fire off a 20 second email, than fill out a 2 minute form, or do a 5 minute search. So it usually comes back to me to merge tickets and dedup.

IMAGINE THIS: big pothole opens up in front of your apartment, right outside the entrance to the lot. You put in a ticket. It's a residential low traffic street so it has low priority. Week or two goes by. OK... print out a note and stick it on the mailbox panel inside the apartment, "want that pothole out front fixed? go to www.mycity.com/maintenance and look up ticket #12345. Click the "ME TOO" button. If we all click that, it'll be fixed fast!" A week goes by, and five other tennants click ME TOO. The priority on that pothole goes from 1/10 to 6/10 due to having 6 complaints on it. Street department has it filled in two days later.

That's how it's supposed to work.

Re:What?

[AmiMoJo]

Just use an average and look for outliers. With many vehicles covering the same roads the odd clunker will be quickly filtered out.

I like your scanner idea. In Japan they use tunnel inspection vehicles with cameras and lasers to produce a 3D map on the inside. A simpler system could be fitted to public vehicles. In fact even just a downward facing camera would be very useful, as it could be paired up with accelerometer data to give staff an instant view of the road surface at problem locations.

Re: What?

[thinkwaitfast]

Problem is they are aren't a majority

That's a problem with democracy. Nobody ever wants what I want.

Re: What?

[Dog-Cow]

So get on the phone and sit there for untold number of hours to report your issue. No one is stopping you from wasting your time due to your own paranoia.

Boston has an app like this. It's useless.

[SuperBanana]

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....

Re:Boston has an app like this. It's useless.

[Dutch Gun]

An app for this sort of thing is a cool idea, but of course, only if the app doesn't suck and the city actually makes an attempt to fix the issues it receives. Call me crazy, but I suspect the app's effectiveness will have a strong correlation with the local government's effectiveness in dealing with it's other day to day issues. Competent local governments will probably make good use of this technology. Incompetent local governments will continue to run things (including new programs like this) in a bumbling, half-assed fashion.

According to the article, in Detroit's system, the person who submitted the request can see the progress of the ticket item as it makes it's way through the system. That sort of feedback is important, as it lets people know they aren't being ignored. So, the city workers must have a way to update the status of individual requests as they process them. Seems like a reasonably good system.

I'm not sure how Boston's compared to that. It sounds like their system needs a way to allow users to give some feedback per ticket, so they can let the city know who's not actually doing their jobs.

Informing them wasn't the problem

[DNS-and-BIND]

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.

Um.

[tlambert]

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"?

Detroit is the future of American cities

[Nova Express]

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.

Re:So did they shut off the water to the buildings

[TurboStar]

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.

Why so late?

[irp]

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 :-)

The international open source alternative

[zypres]

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.

Re:Then they are using the wrong technology.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your suggestion is that somebody should go retrofit extensive tracts of abandoned buildings, most of which were built many decades ago, instead of simply turning the water off?

Re:Then they are using the wrong technology.

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Detroit has been deteriorating since the 50's. It's unreasonable to expect buildings and water infrastructure that old to be retrofitted with new technology when the city is broke.

You're talking about a city that will let abandoned buildings burn because their fire service is broke.