Tracking potholes
Engineering students from around world create an app that lets smartphone users map road conditions.
A far-flung group of engineering students, from schools like MIT, Harvard and Birzeit University in the West Bank, have developed an app that turns a smartphone into a tool to track potholes and measure overall road quality.
No one needs an app to confirm hitting a pothole, but this project could improve life in many ways for drivers — and everyone else.
The students’ test users have already come up with some surprising data (or not so surprising for those familiar with Boston-area streets):
The roads around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are worse than the roads around
Birzeit University.
“The surface streets in Cambridge have the roughness index of a well-maintained dirt road,” said Franz-Josef Ulm, faculty director at MIT’s Concrete Sustainability Hub, who is guiding the students in developing their app, called Carbin.
Poor road quality increases fuel consumption, Ulm said. That was on his mind a couple of years ago during an educational exchange visit to Birzeit University, one of the top engineering schools in the Middle East. Fuel is expensive there, and for some Palestinians, transportation costs rival those of rent and food. He realized that if there was a way to map road quality, drivers could plan trips that cost less and reduced wear and tear on their cars.
Although drivers don’t realize it, they compensate for poor roads by pressing a little harder on the accelerator. So to maintain a constant speed, they burn more fuel and spew out more carbon dioxide.
The quality of highways has a small effect on fuel consumption, but Ulm said road quality could account for 10 percent to 15 percent of fuel use in urban settings. Another motivation for the app? “We were frustrated trying to get road-quality data from the government,” Ulm recalled. Engineers rate road quality using a World Bank metric, the International Roughness Index, which ideally is measured by special vans equipped with lasers to scan the road. They can cost up to $700,000.
At that price, only state transportation departments can afford them, and they usually measure only major highways. U.S. cities (and Ramallah, near Birzeit University, for that matter) rely mostly on citizen complaints or seat-of-the-pants assessments by city employees.
That unscientific approach presents problems, said Glenn Engstrom, director of the National Road Research Alliance, which conducts pavement research at MnROAD, the Minnesota transportation department’s asphalt test track.
“People are far more tolerant of bad roads in urban settings because speeds are lower,” Engstrom said.
He noted that apps like Carbin could be particularly helpful in cities because those expensive vans don’t work as well in stop-and-go traffic (or in freezing weather, aka pothole season).
Accurate data is better than citizen complaints for road maintenance. The time to resurface roads is when the roughness index starts to climb, even before drivers report problems.
“Smooth roads last longer,” Engstrom said, “and that definitely helps both the environment and our pocketbook.”
Upon his return from the West Bank, Ulm bemoaned the lack of roughness-index data on those roads to another engineering professor, Arghavan Louhghalam of the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.
It occurred to her that the accelerometers built into smartphones might be able to measure road roughness.