Politics & Government

Smartphones and Potholes: Dunwoody Residents Use Phone App to Report Road Problems

See, Click, Fix allows residents to report infrastructure issues through a smartphone app

You can fill a pothole in Dunwoody with your smart phone.

No, the city isn’t asking residents to fill cracks in the asphalt with iPhones; instead it has a phone application that allows citizens to report road issues with their phones.

The city started using the program, called See, Click, Fix, in September.

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The application gives people an easy way to report road issues, but more importantly for the city, the application allows users to submit photos and automatically sends in the GPS location for the issue.

Prior to See, Click, Fix, the city had an online form that people could fill out.

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“It was purely – submit a request and we would receive a notification,” said Public Works Director Michael Smith. “It had no mapping feature, none of the other features.”

It comes down to making things more efficient for Smith’s department and giving people an easy way to submit problems.

The application has categories for pavement, storm drains, traffic signals, street signs, crosswalks, right of way maintenance, parks and other problems.

It takes four steps to make a report in the application – take a photo, choose a category, enter in some information and submit.

“If they take a picture and provide as much information as possible, sometimes that can save us from having to send someone out to look at the problem, we can instead just issue a work report,” he said. “Getting the good locations and sometimes have pictures of the problem, it does help and saves time.”

Instead of sending someone out to look at the issue, the city can instead just send a crew out to work on the problem, he said.

“If they are able to use the mobile phone application, it really streamlines things for us,” he said.

Smith said people are signing up for the application, but the city hasn’t yet seen a jump in requests compared to the past and residents are still learning about it.

Smith expects as winter and spring work on the streets, they’ll likely see more requests.

“We tend to have a lot of pavement failures and pothole requests in the winter and spring,” he said.

 

For information on Dunwoody’s See, Click, Fix application, go to http://www.dunwoodyga.gov/residents/SeeClickFix.aspx


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