Research Brief: Assessing Road Quality Using Crowdsourced Smartphone Measurements

Abstract

As the demands on the nation’s roads increase, so too have road maintenance costs. To meet these challenges, agencies must vigilantly monitor road surface quality to properly apportion resources. Traditional methods of assessing road quality, however, remain costly and time-consuming. As an alternative, CSHub has developed a crowd­sourcing tool in collaboration with the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. This tool, called the Carbin app, can offer agencies high-quality data at a lower price and in real-time. Carbin is available on the App Store and Google Play and has collected over 250,000 miles of data since 2019.