Boston seeks to automate pothole reporting

Boston will be offering prize money to innovators who can help develop an automated means of identifying and reporting potholes.

An application for iPhones and some other mobile devices already allows motorists to quickly convey the location of potholes, graffiti and other nuisances to City Hall. The new application would rely on sensors in a smart phone that would be able to recognize a pothole the instant a car strikes it. The pothole location would be transmitted automatically to City Hall.

Nigel Jacob, part of a two-member city team known as the Office of New Urban Mechanics, said that when he and his colleague tested the technology, there were many false positives recorded as a result of crossing over railroad tracks, elevated crosswalks, and other road features.

“The challenge,” Jacob said, “is going to be to really understand what the signature of a real pothole is.”

City officials have arranged a partnership with Liberty Mutual, which is providing Boston with $25,000 in prize money to dispense, and InnoCentive, an international “crowdsourcing” organization that promotes collaborative problem-solving.

The $25,000 likely will be shared among several individuals or groups that succeed in solving different aspects of the technical challenge, Jacob said. At least one of the winners is expected to be chosen by the end of April.

“This [project] breaks very new ground,” Jacob said. “Outside of doing it this way, if we wanted to do a road condition index, we would need to hire an engineering consulting firm, with very special equipment. It’s costly, it’s time-consuming, and you can’t do it very often.”