Pothole Reporting Competition

There's an awesome website called SeeClickFix that I blogged about over at WestwoodBlog. It allows citizens to report potholes and other problems so the city can fix them. It's full of reports of potholes and general complaints about road conditions. It would be great if the "fixers" were watching it, but it appears they aren't.

I was going to add the widget to WestwoodBlog after we discussed it at our Pedestrian and Bike Safety Committee meeting and I saw it all over Boston.com's YourTown sites. But we called a few towns who were listed as monitoring the site. Dedham--didn't know about it until a week ago. Needham--busy building their own service reporting tool. Boston? Heck, they have deployed an iPhone app for this purpose and have an extensive Citizens Connect service to enable all sorts of online transactions and services.

The idea behind SeeClickFix is great--a free service that will help cities and town use thousands of "eyes on the street" to find and report problems. But I think most municipalities would prefer problem reports be driven directly to the people who can do something about it. Maybe towns that don't already have their own problem reporting systems online can take advantage of this and the other towns can use it to complement their existing systems.