Car In Bike Lane dot [sometld]

[daguar]

Main use case:

• Allow a user to easily bring up a web site on their smartphone when they are biking and encounter a car parked in/blocking the bike lane, take a picture which both submits it to the site DB as well as submits a report to the local 311
  • It should get the location using the geolocation API in the browser (prompt user) and POST that so it can be saved in the DB too
  • It should save, date, time, location (lat/lng, maybe address lookup out of band?), and image to the DB
  • It should submit a report to 311 in some way (Open311 API? SeeClickFix? Twitter @-mention to the city?)

Goals:

• Increase reports of cars parked in bike lane to the city
• Collect data on when/where cars are parked in bike lanes to advocate for more targeted enforcement that reduces the problem

MVP:

• v0.1:
  • Only I and a handful of users try it out for experience in the field
  • Only the "experience" — no saving or 311 submission
• v0.2:
  • Experience improvements based on tester feedback
  • Actually saves info to DB
  • Only San Francisco for 311 report submission
    • Easiest way to submit via 311 (maybe start manually doing it; then maybe transition to tweets at them; then explore and maybe transition to API)

MVP assumptions to test:

• Does it work across most devices?
• Are people comfortable using it while stopped in the bike lane?
• Does a smartphone pic take way too long to upload using basic HTML? AKA do we need to compress on the client side?
• Do we need to validate pictures before submitting? (probably why we start by manually submitting to 311)

Possible future use cases after initial usage/user feedback/tech feasibility tests:

• Allow someone to report later using a picture taken before?
  • Lots of questions here, but big one is validity
• Compress image on the client side to make upload fast (what size do we compress down to?)
• Expand to other jurisdictions (allow others to write those integrations? or encourage redeployment for single-tenant instances?)

Other notes:

• Looked at enabling people to use SMS (MMS) to report, but it strips location info and would be annoying to text your location relative to the browser picking it up
• Mobile Safari strips Exif info, so can't get location from picture itself (why we do geolocation API)

[wroscoe]

I like this idea, especially if it could publicly shame people based on their licence plate number. 😄 One thing to consider is what this provides, that submitting directly to SeeClickFix doesn't do already. Let me know where to sign up as an alpha tester.

[daguar]

@wroscoe I think "shaming" as a theory of change is always a little dicey — how do they know they've been posted? Does that actually affect behavior? So I'd say more of my goals are (a) increase reports of this to 311, (b) collect data that can be used for effective advocacy around enforcement.

One thing to consider is what this provides, that submitting directly to SeeClickFix doesn't do already.

I think that's part of the point — it already allows you to do it, but I think my hypotheses here are that (a) SeeClickFix is a little bit high-effort for this use case — a ton of data input that can be streamlined radically by focusing on just this one use-case; (b) having a hyper-focused mini-service [JUST reporting cars in bike lanes] allows you to streamline interactions and make it extremely low effort AND increases uptake because it's in fact LESS of a general use-case, and people are motivated more by their specific pain than the generic reporting of issues.

[daguar]

Based on that I've added a note on goals:

Goals:

• Increase reports of cars parked in bike lane to the city
• Collect data on when/where cars are parked in bike lanes to advocate for more targeted enforcement that reduces the problem

[skimbrel]

hello! raising hand from twitter thread

[skimbrel]

Here is a really, really hacky thing that saves images to the Glitch assets directory and returns them after form submit! https://glitch.com/edit/#!/sharp-bagpipe

[daguar]

@skimbrel Rad! I saw this via @slightlylate that you can force camera rather than choice with:

<input type="file" accept="image/*" capture="user">

I have not yet figured out how to contribute but that's a thing.

[skimbrel]

I have a private invite-to-join link to send but don't want to post it publicly. Where can I email to?

[daguar]

@skimbrel Could you shoot it to (my GitHub username) at gmail ?