FAQ

What is this blog for?
Who is this blog for?
How does this blog work?
I don't know the street name, can I just draw you a map?

This is a publicly accessible place where cyclists can report road hazards, particularly the potholes that sprout faster than daffodils as spring approaches in New England. Somewhat in the spirit of crimewatch communities, the premise of this blog is that all those extra eyes on the miles of public roads could help out with the public safety if they had a conduit to the authorities in charge of fixing the roads. If nothing else, it augments any other recorded notifications that repairs are needed to local roads.

Two cyclists who happen to work in Lexington, MA were just talking, as all New England cyclists naturally do, about the poor and constantly changing condition of the roads this time of year. And one of them said "wouldn't it be handy if there were a wiki or something to track and report potholes". A blog is not as flexible as a wiki but the setup is truly trivial so here it is. Thus, this blog is actually for two communities: cyclists who brave the pocked and pitted public ways and the DPW road crews who have their hands full just patching the potholes they already know about, let alone cruising the streets to find other trouble spots. Now its true that a web page is visible to the entire planet yet we are talking about trying to introduce a slight new efficiency for an entirely local problem. If, after spreading the word to local cyclists we find that the basic idea is helpful to other locales or taking in hits from out-of-town riders, a bit of zip-code intelligence can be added to the blog so that it spawns multiple tracking lists of potholes, each targeted to an appropriate town agency. That level of effort my be compensated with a little advertising revenue, or tithe, from your friendly LBS [local bike shop is one of 13 meanings for that acronym!]
The other party who we hope will find some benefit in the information gathered here is the various DPWs or highway departments. Their participation here is obviously at will and the dispatchers for the road repair crews probably have well defined procedures for finding out whats busted and prioritizing repairs. Just saying, we want to help. These departments will be contacted and made aware that the information bikers discover in their travels will be here, "for what its worth" as we say.

There are several functions performed here

• gather reports of road hazards
• track the status of listed hazards
• provide public notice of hazards.

The perishable nature of such information is well enough suited to the nature of blogs: posts are dated and move toward obscurity and oblivion as newer posts push the older ones to the bottom of the page. Well enough but not ideally suited. The report of a pothole should be uniform and require the minimum of computer skilz and time on the rider's part. The DPW may value the information but cannot go out of its way or develop new procedures to get at the information. A fixed URL and a single click, possibly with one pull-down for selecting the town, would be the most complicated UI envisioned. The native input capacity for blogging tools is to accept "comments" attached to a particular post. So to get things started, each month a new post will go up and any potholes to report can just be mentioned in the comments. The post will remind you of the basic information needed to identify the problem. Blogger provides for anonymous commenting but comment spam and other abuses are always a problem. If we don't seem to be getting abuse by merely requiring commenters to validate their non-bot status then we will not burden users or maintainers with the hassles of having "identities". But of course there are benefits to leaving contact information so that others can discuss the problems found or just ask for clarifications such as exact location. While we are starting this up, commenting is all you get. To comment on any post, click on the link at the bottom of the post that says how many comments their have been. This causes a comment form to pop up. If their is no link, commenting is turned off for that post.

No, you cannot draw a map here. No need to anyway. If you are pretty certain of the location by means of recalling visual or geographic clues, then go to google maps and zoom/pan to the spot. Google map has high resolution satellite photography for the entire state of Massachusetts. Play with the navigation controls at the left and the map/satellite/hybrid buttons on the right until you get the hang of it. As a cyclist, you may never leave home without checking this tool once you have used it. When you are certain the location of the hazard is on screen, move the cursor over the exact spot and double click. This will center the map on the location. Then click on the "Link to this location" button just above the upper right corner of the map. That will change the URL to a contain the exact GPS coordinates. copy and paste this URL into the comment in which you report your hazard and anybody can just paste that URL into a browser to view the exact location for themselves. I have an example of a reported hazard in the March pothole report and the second comment demonstrates this mapping technique. [feel free to use HTML tags for the link if you want to show off your web fu]