Crowdsourced snow removal: howsmystreet.com

Good news: February’s blizzard conditions have created something other than havoc. A team at Carnegie Mellon University compiled Twitter traffic on Pittsburgh’s city street conditions to map the impassable and the passable. The result, howsmystreet.com, had attracted nearly 1,500 responses from locals within five days of its launch.

The team from Carnegie Mellon University—faculty members Priya Narasimhan and Rajeev Gandhi and students Nathan Mickulicz, Shahriyar Amini and Max Salley –created the application’s Twitter and Facebook accounts in a mere 48 hours. The site went live on February 9, with contributors reporting whether local roads were clear or unplowed with color-coded marks.

“The great thing is that it’s free, simple and useful. We kept the interface really simple. Every city can do this,” says the creator. In fact, they already have: by dragging the Google maps in different directions, users across the state, as well as Washington D.C., have weighed in with snow info.

Crowd-sourcing may be a way for city residents to report other public works problems, like broken sidewalks. “The city says they want to find a way to incorporate howsmystreet data automatically into the city’s 311 complaints system,” says Narasimhan. “It started with seeing the amount of response—they know they need more eyes on the ground.”

Last year Narasihmhan helped developed iBurgh, the smartphone app that allows city residents to report potholes to the city’s public works department.

Source: Priya Narasimhan, CMU
Writer: Chris O’Toole