fixmystreet.com

I've no experience of fixmystreet.com but its been around for a while, and I doubt that it would have lasted long if councils ignored it. I guess that they get reports in a standard format that are easy for them to deal with. (My local council (Leicester) has an app for reporting stuff that I've used a few times to report rubbish, trolleys, hedge cutting and the like, and have found it to be effective.)

From the report:

Sent to Birmingham City Council less than a minute later. FixMyStreet ref:

Seems like a forum for busy-bodies to think they're doing the right thing, a few local examples ... "parking just after the end of some yellow lines" ... "trees in school grounds too high" ... "streetlamp giving out electromagnetic radiation above fda guidelines"

Oh, do you have a reference for that last one? Could have some fun with that.

Some councils use it, and some don't. In Oxfordshire and North Yorkshire, if you reported a road sign that had fade or had been knocked over in an accident, it automatically logged the fault with the council.

Now we live in East Yorkshire it's necessary to report the problem by phoning the council, and then there is the problem of identifying the location. Like so many organisations, emergency services included, they are obsessed with "what's the postcode", and can't get their brains around the fact that a random place on a country lane doesn't have a postcode - or if it does, the code covers a vast area. When I last had to report a fault, I took the trouble to get the OS grid reference by looking on a map, but was told "my system will only accept a postcode". I had to suggest to the person I spoke to that they might like to use streetmap.co.uk to find the relevant road junction by following my instructions "Search for Anytown. Find the B1234 heading southwards. Two kilometres - head two two blue squares south of the junction with the A

To give them credit, the woman I spoke to said I had been a lot clearer and more unambiguous than many people who reported faults. The relevant road sign was repaired within a day or so.

There may be a map-based tool to place a cross at the site (as you can do in fixmystreet) but finding such a thing is well-nigh impossible on most local councils' web sites.

I have never used it myself, but would Just Three Words work in that case?

Probably - as long as they are geared up to translate W3W back to a map reference that they will use internally to direct their crews to the site.

About 15 years ago I uncovered a horrendous problem with one police force's 999 call-handling software and/or training of operators to use it.

It was shortly after the "M1 A 123.4" location signs had been rolled out to motorways. The number gives the carriageway A or B and the distance from some datum point. They are designed specifically for giving locations for emergency services.

I had a non-smart phone, so no GPS.

I was driving home, somewhere on the M1 a long way from the junction where I had joined and the one where I would leave, so I had no idea where I was. I witnessed a crash on the opposite carriageway so I phoned

The operator was utterly clueless. He wanted the postcode - WTF, random bits of motorway don't have postcodes and even if they did, how would I determine it? OK, how about the last junction or service station I'd passed - no idea, not paying attention because it's not relevant since it's a long way from where I will be coming off.

I offered to stop on the hard should and read the info from the older-techmology red-and-white posts at 100 metre intervals. No use - he wouldn't know what to do with that information if I gave it to him. He kept coming back to "can't you ask someone what the postcode is?".

When I got home, I wrote an email to the relevant police force to alert them to this big problem: that they were not able to process emergency-location information that the public might read from signs or marker posts. I had a very apologetic letter saying that they had listened to the recording of my call, were very impressed that I had kept my temper when I was being stonewalled, and that they had identified "a staff re-training need". They agreed that I had given a precise and unambiguous location - but the operator hadn't known how to use that info.

At the other end of the scale, more recently when my wife and I had phones with GPS, my wife called in details of a car that was at a precarious angle on the hard shoulder and which *may* have crashed, and the 999 operator didn't need any location details - eg lat/long from the car's satnav "emergency location" screen or OS grid reference from the GPS app that I have installed on both phones. The emergency call had automatically passed the phone's GPS location so they knew where we were at the moment that the call began - and he confirmed verbally "you're close to the turning to Kirk Smeaton heading north". I was impressed with that use of technology. That was definitely using GPS, because it was too precise to be from triangulation of phone masts in the area, even if that information was available instantly. I'm not sure what the radius of the "circle of confusion" is for triangulation, but I bet it's much larger than the 5-50 metre radius that GPS can give.

I stopped a couple of weeks ago to report a stopped car in the running lane of a major road. Not a smart motorway - but similar.

I stopped in the next emergency lay-by, and used the phone.

Nobody else did. After about 10 minutes ringing I gave up.

Hmm... next time I'll try 999 on my mobile and see if that works better.

Andy

Our local parish magazine, delivered free to all households, tells us this is where to report problems. Several reports of street lights on all day or not on at night have resulted in action. You get a map with all the street light numbered.

Who funds that then?

Usually the mags carry paid-for adverts and it is the advertisers who pay for the printing costs.

It used to work, and quite well, but then our local council seemed to block it. I guess they got inundated with reports.

That would be perfect, if the authority supported that method.

Same here but we pay £5 pa as well.

I can't complain, as I have no idea what three words represent my house.

W3W is a great idea which is slightly flawed in its implementation because it uses singulars and plurals, and homonyms (OK, homophones) in its allowed words:

wombat.apple.river will be a different location to wombats.apple.river

and

flower.pear.fir will be different to flour.pair.fur

and flower.pear.fur might sound like flower.pear.fair if the former is said with a Liverpudlian accent (likewise for "poached" pronounced like "perched" in the Hull accent - and other -oh- words pronounced -er-)

This causes great problems if the words are being read out over a poor mobile phone connection by someone who is panicking at the scene of an accident.

As far as I know, the app hasn't ever been modified to weed out plurals and homonyms.

Think of the work that went into making sure that the 26 words of the Nato phonetic alphabet sound unique, and the "fife"/"niner" exaggerated pronunciations for "five" and "nine".