CTC, in collaboration with construction company Aggregate Industries, has produced a downloadable free software app for the Apple iPhone. By using the iPhone's built-in camera and GPS locator, together with the large display screen, users can report potholes and other road defects right from the roadside. Photograph: www.fillthathole.org.uk. Like buses, three excellent free cycling apps have come along almost at once. There's cyclestreets, reviewed a month ago; the similarly useful (and chart-busting) Bike Hub, soon to be reviewed; and now the free Fill That Hole.
"You spot it ... You log it ... They sort it" is how the FillThatHole.org.uk website describes its own role.
The initiative, established in 2007, allows you to provide details of bike-threatening roadway hazards, and the CTC does the job of passing them on to the relevant highway authority – usually a local council. The organisation also does a lot of number-crunching, and presents useful figures about the number of hazards reported and the councils that are best at responding. These are the kinds of jobs that might be done by the Department for Transport in an ideal world, but as it is, the cost is being met by the CTC and a maker of road-surfacing materials (go figure).
Like BikeHub and Cyclestreets, this smartphone app makes desktop web-browing look a bit old fashioned, because the tasks of taking a picture and logging a location are far easier than they would be on a computer. This meant I expected the process to take about two minutes.
Finding a pothole, of course, took a matter of seconds. It was more of a pot-trench in fact, with a pothole posse hanging around it trying to look hard. Job one was logging the location, which should be virtually automatic with GPS. Unfortunately my iPhone located me and my trench three miles north of where we were, meaning lots of screen scrubbing to get the pin in the right place on the map. But CTC tells me that one of their first tweaks to the software is doing much to resolve this issue.
Task two was saving the picture, which was quick, easy and almost fun. Task three was selecting the "hazard type". My trench most closely resembled "Rut or gully" on the list. Task four, slightly superfluously I felt, as the traffic roared by, was writing some more about it. Picture, exact location, pothole type ... does the local authority really need to know more? But the server wouldn't accept the form without a bit of prose in the relevant box, so I briefly waxed lyrical. Really dedicated pothole-spotters can turn on the "additional information" switch and get busy with a tape measure, entering depth, distance from the kerb, and other details – but that wasn't for me.
So, job done, eight minutes later - could be quicker, but not bad. Add to this the fact that, about 10 days later, my trench was filled, freeing local pedestrians and cyclists (and minor planets) from the threat of disappearance.
CTC tell me that an Android version is a possibility, but they (rightly) want to make sure they have the resources for user support on the wide range of phones this would entail.
They add that this time of year is when pothole reporting traditionally starts to take off, peaking in January and February – and they're expecting that fact, combined with the app's popularity, to make this a record winter for pothole-spotting. Let's hope local authorities have the budgets to keep up.
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