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Ha! Android app tries to fix bad roadways


ReconRat

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Street Bump app finds potholes and sends the data to the city for repair.

Combines the app with motion sensors in the phone to find the potholes in the road...

Developed by the city of Boston.

Street Bump app detects potholes, tells city officials

120216021546-streetbump-app-city-boston-story-top.jpg

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/120216021546-streetbump-app-city-boston-story-top.jpg

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This might be the most genius thing ever if they actually use the data to fix hole and this isn't just a marketing ploy(sp?) I just busted a tire in Cleveland and they used the excuse "they didn't know there was a hole where I said and were not obligated to fix my tire". This would be proof they had warning about holes and had no reason not to fix them. $250 for a new tire and alightment!

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The standard in most cities is that if the city was notified prior to the incident, they will pay for part or all of the damage done. A record of such notification would be good.

I hit one hard at the top of a freeway ramp a few years ago, and thought that would probably be a bad tire in a year or so. Then I passed a small Japanese car with it's front axle torn completely off! I was in a 77 Cutlass. A tank. And yeah, the tire went bad a year later...

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So what happens when you drop the phone in the car while driving down the road?

They said that was the original problem. Bad data. They did a contest to create an algorithm that didn't register the bad data. University math and engineering mostly responded to that task. Apparently it still goes off on railroad tracks and speed bumps anyway.

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They said that was the original problem. Bad data. They did a contest to create an algorithm that didn't register the bad data. University math and engineering mostly responded to that task. Apparently it still goes off on railroad tracks and speed bumps anyway.

That's my point. I don't see how it could tell the difference between pot holes/dropped/R&R tracks/speed bumps/edge of roadways etc etc. I'm no enginerd but seems like the data would be skewed.

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But unless they got multiple hits in the exact location there is no need to investigate. I get what you are saying but if all the data is getting compiled by a program you should be able to see where the gps location of multiple hits and say ok there is no railroad there lets check it out.

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But unless they got multiple hits in the exact location there is no need to investigate. I get what you are saying but if all the data is getting compiled by a program you should be able to see where the gps location of multiple hits and say ok there is no railroad there lets check it out.

This sounds like how it would work, and once they identify hot spots that are really false alarms such as road height differences when turning into a parking lot or something and they would mark it in the database as not an issue.

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So what happens when you drop the phone in the car while driving down the road?

They will use an algorithm to mine the data for correlation. Some cars will avoid the pot hole, some will hit it. Some will trigger when there is no pothole, but those cars will lead to spurious results that can be filtered out of the pot hole candidates reports.

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Someone needs to develop an app that correlates vehicle speed data with the road the cars are on and produce a realtime map of effective speed of cars - and make that data available to the GPS routing algorithm. People can be rerouted within minutes of a road closure, even if they won't be at the accident location for 30 minutes... Early enough to make a difference.

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Someone needs to develop an app that correlates vehicle speed data with the road the cars are on and produce a realtime map of effective speed of cars - and make that data available to the GPS routing algorithm. People can be rerouted within minutes of a road closure, even if they won't be at the accident location for 30 minutes... Early enough to make a difference.

My TomTom GPS will do it. And Google maps has a layer that shows it.

Not sure if my Droid has something that will do it, I haven't looked...

edit: TomTom has an app for iPhone and is bringing one out for the Droid.

Actual apps, not tried any of them yet. But there are several.

Some update fast and include accident and speed trap reporting.

These are all free apps, I think. Paid for probably work better.

Real Time Traffic & Speed Cam

https://market.android.com/details?id=net.monthorin.rttraffic16&hl=en

INRIX TRAFFIC!

https://market.android.com/details?id=inrix.android.ui&feature=search_result

US Traffic

Waze - Just looked, this one even lets you chat to people around you in traffic... (ok, this one is just too cool, downloading it now)

Beat the Traffic

US Traffic Jam & Speed Traps

Edited by ReconRat
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Eh maybe, we'll see. Like I said, I'm no enginerd or anything. :)

I have done data mining on publicly-collected data looking for patterns of human behavior. I had to write a report that measure technology export compliance (restricting technology exports to bad countries like Iran / North Korea etc) by mining terabytes of public web logs. You'd be amazed at what companies can do with enough data. And it's really easy to filter out of identify unusual patterns of behavior. If one spot gets pothole reports from 5% of cars going through that area then I'd go look at it. If it gets reports from 5 cars, then I'd ignore it.

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