16 December 2012

New Urban Mechanics ~ Boston's App Office...

The Globe's Eric Moskowitz writes about Bumps in the Road...
"A smartphone application known as Street Bump, developed by an in-house City Hall think tank and tested by 25 municipal employees, records the location of every bump a driver hits. Of the first 100,000 ride-jarring bumps registered by the app, traditional potholes accounted for a stunningly small percentage. They were vastly outnumbered by misaligned castings, according to the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, the think tank that developed the app. [... They] are also behind Citizens Connect, the nearly four-year-old app that ­allows residents to send the city GPS-tagged photos and descriptions of problems such as graffiti or darkened streetlights. After the early success of that app, the team ­began to wonder if smartphones could be used to detect potholes automatically, without waiting for citizens to report them. They developed an app harnessing two smartphone components -- the accelerometer, which gauges the direction and acceleration of a phone’s movement, and the Global Positioning System receiver -- to register the jostling of a phone placed in a car’s cupholder or center console and to mark the location based on GPS satellites. And they set out to refine it to weed out false positives, such as speed bumps."
The bottom-line is that new urban apps, data-driven priorities, and rapid responsiveness are the stuff of the modern vital city!

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