Last week I was on vacation and traveled to the beautiful & historical city of Aurangabad. What could have been a wonderful vacation turned out to be a bone jarring experience while driving to various historical spots in the city. The locals told me that the excuse given by local government is they are not aware of the potholes and as soon as they are informed they try their best to fill the pot holes. The local government should be concerned about the potholes because apart from being danger to life of residents (In India more than 10000 people die because of accidents due to pothole), potholes are bad news for tourism as well. Every tourist friendly country across the world boasts of good roads and neglecting the roads will have adverse affect on the tourism revenue.
In Digital India governments cannot have such flimsy excuses of not doing their job of maintaining the roads. The local government should be using technology to report, locate and monitor occurrence of potholes. Almost every civic official carries a smart phone and the accelerometer in a smart phone can sense when a vehicle encounters a pothole or sudden dip in the road. With some effort we can build an algorithm that can use accelerometer data, GPS data to build an application that can be used to report potholes and even the severity or size of the potholes. Using crowd sourcing large amount of data can be collected which can be further processed to validate the pothole locations. Smartphone used by drivers of City buses and government vehicles that travel across the city could be primary source of pothole data.
I anyone has any experience on building such an application do share your feedback with me. I hope mayors of Aurangabad and other cities that face problem of potholes are made aware that with minimum investment and some incentive to their employees government can build a system that will ensure their road are monitored 24/7, potholes reporting is automated and they can even cross check the claims of contractors who are supposed to fix the potholes saving millions for the government and residents.
In Digital India governments cannot have such flimsy excuses of not doing their job of maintaining the roads. The local government should be using technology to report, locate and monitor occurrence of potholes. Almost every civic official carries a smart phone and the accelerometer in a smart phone can sense when a vehicle encounters a pothole or sudden dip in the road. With some effort we can build an algorithm that can use accelerometer data, GPS data to build an application that can be used to report potholes and even the severity or size of the potholes. Using crowd sourcing large amount of data can be collected which can be further processed to validate the pothole locations. Smartphone used by drivers of City buses and government vehicles that travel across the city could be primary source of pothole data.
I anyone has any experience on building such an application do share your feedback with me. I hope mayors of Aurangabad and other cities that face problem of potholes are made aware that with minimum investment and some incentive to their employees government can build a system that will ensure their road are monitored 24/7, potholes reporting is automated and they can even cross check the claims of contractors who are supposed to fix the potholes saving millions for the government and residents.
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