We’ve covered a number of iPhone apps that field citizen complaints in a few different cities — Boston, Pittsburgh, San Jose — but always wondered if angry folks snapping potholes on the way to work would find their grievances fell on deaf ears.
The good news: if you live in Boston and can afford an iPhone, it’s like having a personal fix-it crew.
Some 2,500 downloaders of CitizensConnect have filed 750 complaints since October; at least one reports swift action:
There was the photo of trash bags hauled to the curb on the wrong day in Beacon Hill, the spray paint covering a bus stop in East Boston, and a rattling metal plate on Massachusetts Avenue in the South End that woke up Tom Kozlek at night.
“I feel like if I send them something, it will actually get done, as opposed to the other way of doing it, which would be to call them and report it,’’ said Kozlek, 29, a Boston University Medical School student, who said he also uses the iPhone application to report potholes he sees while biking to his girlfriend’s home in the Fenway. Often, the city fills the hole within a day or two, he said.
“Pretty much any pothole between my apartment and my girlfriend’s apartment gets reported,’’ he said.
Newspaper reports note that iPhone complaints come from across the city, but are “concentrated in an iPhone belt that stretches from downtown, through the Back Bay and South End, into the Fenway and Jamaica Plain.”
It’ll be interesting to see in the long run whether iPhone complaints concentrate in more affluent or more trafficked areas.
Via Boston
