The Tweeting Pothole Tweets City Officials to Get Itself Fixed

Nobody likes potholes. Not only are they a sore sight on the road, they also make a driver’s life bumpy and very unpleasant. That’s even before we get to the damages it can cause on a car or worse, the injuries a motorcyclist might incur because of one.

However, getting potholes fixed can take some time and some urgency is required. Which is exactly what the The Tweeting Pothole project organised in Panama City, Panama aims to do. Residents there have been dealing with potholes of different magnitudes for several years that it has even become a running joke among the city’s residents, kind of like us here in Malaysia.

To highlight and remedy the bad shape of streets there, one of the city’s most popular news channels, Telemetro Reporta, worked together with a local creative agency P4 Ogilvy & Mather to engineer and ingenious solution – an electronic device that sends a message directly to the officials whenever a driver hits a pothole.

As the name suggests, the The Tweeting Pothole is installed in a pothole and is made up of two parts, a small circular pressure sensor and a wireless network module placed nearby. Whenever a car hits a pothole and runs over the pressure sensor, it is activated, sending a signal to the network module which in turn, sends a tweet to the Panama City Ministry of Public Works with an often humorous message and a request that the pothole be fixed.

The devices were scattered around the most heavily used roads in Panama City where there are a high number of potholes. Telemetro Reporta even dedicated a section of the show to highlights the project with reporters interviewing drivers on the road.

The result? A large number of potholes have been fixed as you can see from the video that shows us the before and after effects on the road.

For those fluent in Spanish, you can check out The Tweeting Pothole’s Twitter account at @Elhuecotwitero.

Do you think this would be an interesting project to be executed here as well?