Street Bump Video

In 2011, we launched Street Bump: a mobile app that gathers data about Boston’s streets, using a smartphone’s built-in sensors, as residents drive. The City of Boston can aggregate the collected data to find and fix problems and plan long-term infrastructure improvements. The Street Bump code will be open-sourced so that it can easily be adopted and scaled by cities around the country.

Why we did this

Like any city, Boston is constantly working to maintain, repair, and upgrade its transportation infrastructure. Identifying potholes and other problems in our roadways has traditionally been accomplished by contractors or crews of Public Works Department employees who drive through Boston to spot them — a time-intensive process that does not always identify issues quickly.

At the same time, the near-ubiquity of smartphones has created the possibility for an army of volunteer pothole-spotters — an opportunity we first tapped into with the Citizens Connect app. But what if City workers and residents could help identify problems in our streets, in real-time, without having to lift a finger?

The experiment

Hypothesis: Developing an app that allows users to collect and submit roadway quality data as they drive will greatly improve the City’s ability to identify, target, and repair potholes and other infrastructure issues in a timely and strategic way.

Street Bump has been developed through a series of experiments. In 2011, in collaboration with Fabio Carrera and the Red Fish Group, we built a alpha version of the app, which confirmed for us that smart phones were sensitive enough to sense road problems. Later that year, we collaborated with Innocentive on public good challenge to refine the algorithm used to identify these road issues. Based on the results of the competition, we partnered in 2012 with the Public Works Department, IDEO and the software company Connected Bits to build the current version. This version app utilizes the accelerometers and GPS of a smartphone to identify potential issues and their locations as the user drives — data which then can be aggregated by the City to map both urgently-needed fixes as well as areas ripe for long-term investment. Once a problem is identified in Street Bump, it can be added to the City’s work order management system to schedule a repair. Currently, working with researchers at Boston University, we are refining the algorithms further to enhance the ability of the app to identify bumps for the City’s Public Works Department to fix.

Results and lessons learned

  • Street Bump is still undergoing extensive testing and refinement — but initial analyses of data collected demonstrated that the app successfully detects many problems while keeping false positives under 10%. We are working with machine intelligence experts in Boston University’s Electrical & Computer Engineering Departent to improve the app’s ability to isolate actual defects even more accurately.
  • The biggest lesson learned so far has been what makes bumpy roads in Boston. While residents most frequently report problems about potholes, the biggest cause of bumps is sunk manhole covers (a problem found four times as frequently as potholes.) Working with utility companies, 1,250 of the worst manhole covers have been fixed. This finding spurred our participation in the Living Labs Global competition.

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