… Potholes vs AI
The way that your local authority currently maintains the roads is probably pretty torturous. Typically, the council employs a team of highway safety inspectors, whose job it is to go out every day and survey the roads. Depending on how important the road is, inspections could be, say, monthly, quarterly, or every six months.
These inspections are not only focused on potholes. They’re also surveying for other roadside hazards, like broken or obscured signage, and overflowing vegetation. If they notice something wrong, they’ll typically have to park up, get out of the car, take a photo of the problem and take down all of the information the maintenance team will need to come and fix it.
Essentially then, the current method of maintaining the roads is a time consuming, laborious process. It’s also far from foolproof. For example, often inspectors will ignore smaller problems. Say, a chip in the road that hasn’t yet grown large enough to be a problem, because the hassle of the paperwork and the time constraints on the inspector outweigh the need to stop and deal with it.