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news
Auto-Complain pothole marking app (image taken from Vimeo video)Video: Cycling app automatically marks potholes with spray paint
If you feel that life’s too short to complain about potholes with only a vague hope that something might be done about them, what about if you could automate the process? Fastcoexist reports on German designer Florian Born who has developed an app that automatically emails the council about any potholes you ride over.
But there’s more. He’s also developed an add-on that physically marks the location with a chalk-based paint. Take a look.
Auto-Complain from Florian Born on Vimeo.
The Auto-Complain app works with a phone's accelerometer to identify bumps in the road and you can set it to a personalised threshold, depending on what you consider to be a problem. When it detects a sufficiently large disturbance, the app logs the location and – if the spray attachment is being employed – marks the spot with a jet of paint.
At the end of your ride, the locations of the various bumps and potholes are uploaded to auto-complain.com and a PDF of the information is produced and sent to whoever is responsible for the roads.
The idea is not dissimilar to that behind a recent patent filed by Google.
"If you make it available for lots of people, you get statistics on where the most problems are and where is the highest density of bike riders facing problems," says Born. "That's a good thing for riders and the government because they don't have to manually look for potholes."
Born hopes to make the app available to the public in February, once he's finished his degree.
Alex has written for more cricket publications than the rest of the road.cc team combined. Despite the apparent evidence of this picture, he doesn't especially like cake.
Latest Comments
- mdavidford 53 min 31 sec ago
Both options are lacking a bit of innovative thinking. They should get someone creative to respray them as 'Lemon bikes'.
- slc 54 min 52 sec ago
No rounding - it was 26 minutes. Looks as though someone has walked it many times and found the mean to obtain such precision. Not just looked on...
- Rendel Harris 1 hour 4 sec ago
I've put those on Mrs H's bike and keep meaning to put them on mine as well, they are really effective because not only can drivers see you clearly...
- Doug_D 1 hour 11 min ago
Another book suggestion - I can highly recommend "Lost Summers and Half-Forgotten Afternoons: A Mint Sauce collection" - a beautifully presented...
- chrisonabike 2 hours 23 min ago
But... the last is only not the case with drivers on normal roads because driving on the cycle path / footway / rolling a vehicle up there is seen...
- mdavidford 3 hours 1 min ago
I think you're missing an opportunity to pack even more tech into it - add accelerometers that can detect whether they're pedalling or stepping....
- chrisonabike 3 hours 26 min ago
Thanks. I guess the question is "need". If the road is busy, it sounds like it is a desired route between places? In which case (given this an...
- mdavidford 3 hours 34 min ago
Don't know what you mean. I thought my suggestion was entirely practical.
- Rapha Nadal 4 hours 9 min ago
I'd buy a motorbike fo rthat kind of money!
Add new comment
16 comments
Reporting potholes should be a hidden feature of Strava aggregating bumpy road markings amongst thousand of users. A bit like their global heatmap http://labs.strava.com/heatmap. Combine the two datasets to prioritise improvements.
Can I hook up a spray can to a proximity detector and point it sideways?
To mark all the potholes where I live you'd need a spray attachment hooked up to a tanker.
Now if we could hack this stuff, link it to a distance sensor & tag close passers we maybe onto a winner
I'll gladly use this if provided with a thousand free cans of spray paint.
The bump-recording, multiplied by thousands of users in a city, would provide a useful dataset about where to repair roads first. Having a spraycan on the bike is probably a bit OTT, but I like the idea of holes being marked - ideally with glow-in-the-dark paint - as it can sometimes take the council a while to get round to them!
And then you forget to turn the app' off and get paint all over your doorstep, and the curb and those steps you went down.
Where any of those potholes by UK standards?
Using the official Dr Forster metric for defining "pot hole" or minor surface defect
Every pothole ... speedbump .... kerb ...
...if you don't mind riding about with a can of spray paint on your bike, this is an excellent idea...
You bloody loony.
Excellent - you self incriminate your rather dull graffiti direct to the relevant authorities.
It's chalk-based paint, so it doesn't stick and washes off in the next rain. I may be wrong, but I think in Germany a temporary marking doesn't count as damage. Street artists use these paints extensively. You could only be prosecuted if you break some other law, for example if it confuses other road users by looking like legal road markings (but note that Germany uses very few road markings).
I can second that the Fill that hole app gets things done. This is a terrible idea on a few levels, mostly for the poor person behind pedalling/riding/driving having wet paint sprayed up them or their nice paintwork.
To be honest - I've had success with the CTC's app - Fill that Hole.
But you do have to describe where each pothole is this does it automatically, but does it mean you have to actually ride over the pothole for it to register would be a bit expensive on rims, tyres etc