Boston Drivers Click to Fight Potholes
Any Bostonian will tell you that driving in the late spring can be worse than driving in the dead of winter. The cause? Potholes—potholes everywhere, formed first by heavy winter snows and then exacerbated by late spring rains—and, of course, the multitude of cars clunking relentlessly into them.
Through a new service called SeeClickFix, Bostonians and anyone else can go online to report pothole sightings and any other non-emergency problems in their neighborhoods. Boston drivers have already marked dozens of potholes from Revere to Waltham to Jamaica Plain.
Started by a group of New Haven techies and community advocates, SeeClickFix allows anyone to start up a “watch list.” Using Google Maps technology, the service pulls up a map of your area. Once you’ve located the problem, you can insert a “ticket” to describe the problem and suggest how to fix it, then you share it with the rest of the online public. So far, Houstonians have reported broken curbs, New Yorkers have complained about inefficient traffic lights, and DC bikers have reported bus lane violations. But so far, potholes are the number one complaint. This is most likely because contributors recognize that even if the city government won’t fix the problem, cyclists and drivers will at least know which roads to avoid.
Try it out. Boston.com linked to the site and made the pothole problem an obsession, but many major cities don’t have any issues reported—yet.
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Design New Haven on Wed, May 13, 2009 at 12:47am
See Click Fix is awesome. A lot of issues, once reported by community members, are fixed within a matter of hours! These range from graffiti to missing signs to speeding teenagers to potholes, and everything in between. The coolest thing about SeeClickFix is that it lets people work together to solve problems, by creating a mini blog type setup with all the people involved. So it is much more powerful, from an advocacy perspective, than just reporting a problem to the government.
Dan Knauss in Milwaukee on Fri, May 29, 2009 at 6:09pm
This ought to be integrated with the EveryBlock.com platform, which is going open source next month. If a city newspaper were to offer a system like that they would have the basis for a really heavily used site well in line with the civic, public interest aspects of traditional journalism. That is the direction the everyblock guys were thinking when they started it…