Smartphone app to detect Boston pothole problems

BOSTON -- Your smartphone may soon help you find your way around Boston’s pothole problem. The city is working on making an app for that.

They are the pockmarks in our streets that make driving the pits.

“Every year there's a ritual of potholes in city, and how do we report them, how get that done?” said Boston’s Mayor Thomas Menino.

Well, now there's an app for that.

7NEWS drove around the city with Nigel Jacob, who's part of the team behind Street Bump, a smartphone application that's marking the bumps in Boston roads.

“The phone is using the GPS to track the location of the phone and the accelerometers in the phone, which are little sensors that these smartphones have to detect when the phone is moving,” said Jacob.

Right now all the app does is gather information about the city's uneven patches.

The next step is to weed out everything that's not a pothole, like manhole covers.

Ultimately Boston is working with the private sector to have an app that gives the city real-time information on where the potholes are and to be able to get them fixed, quickly.

“One it detects a pothole it will automatically create a service request and submit that into the city system for tracking potholes which will then dispatch a pothole repair crew from the DPW,” said Jacob.

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