20 May 2014 What do you do when you see a pothole? Well, in South Africa, all you’ll have to do is click! The Johannesburg Roads Agency has launched a smartphone app called Find and Fix, to enable city residents report potholes, faulty traffic lights, storm water drain issues, missing manhole covers and any other road infrastructure issues.
Users can log an issue with the JRA by submitting a service request from the app. The app then captures the user’s location using the phone’s GPS receiver, and enables the user to send of accompanying photographs and descriptions.
The app, created by a company called Intervate, will help the road agency speed up its maintenance response times; for instance, Khumbuzo Macozoma, managing director of JRA, says that potholes, missing manhole covers and problems with stormwater drains will be fixed within three days, faulty traffic lights fixed within 24 hours and signage improved or corrected within seven days of an incident report. All these will in turn ensure improved road infrastructure.
In addition, reports will be automatically linked and grouped to avoid duplication of service requests and to ensure that when a particular issue is reported by multiple users; that issue is prioritized.
The Find & Fix app is tagged as “snap it, send it, and we’ll fix it” and has already been nominated for a global Microsoft Partner of the Year Award according to Khumbuzo Macozoma, managing director of JRA.