Self-repairing streets using smart contracts.

Does’t involve laser trucks or magic asphalt.

TLDR: Skip to the 10-point ending.

Since 2014, I’ve been studying how US city streets are maintained. I don’t have a degree in civil engineering, not part of a union, nor have I ever fixed a pothole. I am just another self-described public technologist who, perhaps naively, believes that there is a better way we can manage our largest shared public asset, our streets, while also reconciling how we can collaboratively transition to an increasingly automated world where civic futures are distributed more evenly.

First principles

The Internet, back in the early days was called the information superhighway for good reason. Trillions of bits (1s and 0s) moving at high speeds from one hub to another signaled the arrival of the digital age. These digital networks were similar to how trillions of atoms (you, me and stuff) were transported on our streets and highways.

The web set off an inexorable force of 1s and 0s influencing and controlling the actions and activities of you, me, and stuff 👫 + 🚚.

Ubiquitous broadband, cheap hardware, machine learning, and new paradigms of decentralized record-keeping (Blockchain), are signaling an arrival of yet another inflection point. Some call this the new Industrial revolution.

This hard to discern point in time, in the near to very near future will involve reaching and surpassing peak human-decision i.e. a point in time where more operational decisions are made by machine than man. This is distinct from, less visible, and more far reaching than robot automation.

In a field where reality testing is difficult under the best of circumstances, where inauthenticity can be assumed, an AI takeover may prove undetectable — Walter Kirn, “Crossing the Valley”. Harper’s Magazine. April 2016

City operations is where reality testing is particularly difficult and constrained for all the wrong reasons. I call reality testing Ground Truthing. I believe that our cities should be better laboratories to ground truth, at scale. In an age where truthiness can bully the best science, attaining a ground truth is vital.

We are already witnessing signals of new industrial forces at play that significantly affect our ability to discern the Ground Truth.

This post is an attempt to articulate how street maintenance operations (a literal Ground Truth) can be reimagined leveraging bits and atoms while ensuring equitable outcomes.

Where else do we start but pursue the literal Ground Truth?

Software eats the Street

The arrival of self-driving technology has created a flurry of emotions ranging from fantasy -to- skepticism -to- fear.

Cars and Computers, flagship industries of the 20th century converge to influence our 21st century civic futures. To realize desired market potentials and growth graphs, our streets will inevitably need to comply.

I’d want to belabor this point but here are some great graphs from the Bloomberg/Aspen initiative report on Taming the Autonomous Vehicle : A Primer for Cities, a project I was briefly involved with.

While there also exist compelling visions to create “smart streets” and sensor laden roadways, I don’t not see them being adopted on local streets. On highways perhaps, where the economics seem more plausible. Just like the electric car was demonstrated as a possibility in the late 1800s but never realized until the late 1900s — so goes the smart streets movement. It requires a zany executive champion who is currently off doing loopy, boring things in martian proportions.

Until then, we have to deal with regular streets and how to best maintain them while also reconciling with waves of automation.

Thomas Parker Electric Car 1895

(L) Integrated Roadways. (R) Solar Roadways.

Whether these futures end up working in our fellow atoms’ favor is up to how we collectively act when faced with networks of iterating and back-propagating bits, too complex for any single one of us to comprehend.

Today, cities rely mostly on atoms (human-decisions) to keep other atoms (you, me and stuff) moving. Images of public servants and army engineers hauling asphalt, patching potholes and painting pavement markings form a portrait of heroic bulk and brute-force atoms at work.

Unmoved autonomous futures will eventually compel this gallantry of atoms to concede to the precision of bits. There, however, may be opportunities to leverage this tension and power dynamic between bits & atoms for the public benefit.

A self-managed street grid

A simplified street grid with numbered street segments. (Author’s squiggles)

Let me start by saying that Blockchain technology and digital currency enables agency at a monetary transaction level. This requires further unpacking as do most things Blockchain:

…agency at a monetary transaction level implies that any-thing on the internet can independently act to spend money or exchange value with other things on the internet

Let’s break that down even further:

• Blockchain allows, amongst other things, that every entity in a network maintain a secure copy of some “Ground Truth” information. This ground truth includes information about itself and everything else on the network. Modifications to this ground truth are verified through a consensus mechanism (saying yes or no to a change). This is a reason for the obsolescence for a central record.
• A smart contract is, at its simplest form, an if this then that rule that when satisfied involves an exchange of some value.

When these elements come together on the internet via the blockchain, the result is a network of things that is able to independently exchange value and maintain a ground truth securely in a manner that reflects a sense of equity. At least this is, in principle, what we expect blockchain enabled applications to accomplish.

We were told that free markets were supposed to do similarly great things…but that’s not for this undertaking.

What I articulate here is a series of steps that envision how bits can control how streets are maintained and allow equitable autonomous futures, keeping existing public institutions in mind (the heroic atoms).

A purse for every city block

…or wallet.

A street with monetary agency.

A reimagined, self-regulating system for street maintenance involves every street (or street segment) assigned some monetary agency i.e. an ability to spend money on its behalf.

Time for some GROUND TRUTH!

• New York’s 10-year capital spending plan includes a commitment to invest $1.6 Billion and resurface at least 7,640 lane-miles.
• That’s a minimum investment of $160 million every year to resurface at least 764 lane miles with commitments to resurface 1,300 lane miles the in 2018 and 2019.
• In FY 2016, as per the Mayor’s Management Report, New York City resurfaced 1,239.4 lane-miles of NYC streets at an average cost of $149,102 per lane-mile totaling ~$180 million.
• 1 center-lane mile = 20 NYC blocks. Assuming every street has, on average, 3 lanes. That’s 3 lane-miles for every 20 blocks.
• So last year, NYC resurfaced 1,239.4 lane miles; that’s 8,263 city blocks equivalent of resurfaced streets or 23 city blocks resurfaced every single day in the financial year. That’s quite an impressive feat!

1 center-lane mile is counted as 2 lane-miles if a street has 2 lanes. New York City 6,500 center-lane miles, thats ~20,000 lane miles assuming an average of 3 lanes per street.

New York City also has a unique disadvantage of having electric, gas and water utility access on the street bed as opposed to being on the sidewalk. This means that every time there is a gas leak or electric repairs, the streets need to be opened up.

This is a neurosis, plain and simple. I’ve tracked it on my own street where just 3 months after completely milling and repaving, our street got re-opened to fix some drains. Other nefarious things may also be at play here.

Here is a plain view of what $10 million buys in NYC via the New York Independent Budget Office. We’ve already overspent $20 million on street maintenance last year. A drop in the ocean perhaps compared to New York’s $85 Billion budget.

We can, however, do better and do more with less.

Priorities. $20 million would buy the city 416 homeless family shelters vs 44 city blocks worth of streets paved.

How much longer do we wait before private capital swoops in and takes control of our streets in the name of efficiency?

5th Ave between 54th and 59th street brought to you by Apple Inc. $5 entrance fee. Free access to iPhone X owners.

Never gonna happen you say?

NYT’s BottomLine Nation illustrates how smaller cities and towns are witnessing a quiet takeover of water and ambulance services by private equity. Are our streets next?

Keith Mozee (Los Angeles) and Galileo Orlando (New York City) are the street maintenance chiefs of the 2 largest American cities, who, along with Transportation commissioners and their Mayors, help decide how ~50,000 lane miles of asphalt get maintained. I invite them to dream with us. This dream does not require military-grade laser vans or asphalt with magical self-healing properties. Just some keen and publicly conscious geeks in front of a screen and a willingness to try something new.

(L) Military-grade laser vans that survey, at extremely high precision & costs, only small sections of the city’s street grid every few years (R) Self healing asphalt ; prove me wrong and deliver this for 20,000 lane miles of street.

A 10-step proposal towards a decentralized street maintenance.

1. Every street segment or standard city block is assigned a digital wallet that contains some pre-defined tax-payer money.
2. Digital street condition surveys (not windshield surveys!) are performed in real-time across every single city block. Our SQUID project has demonstrated how this can be done at low-cost using open-source technology. These surveys can be performed either by dedicated municipal fleets or private vehicles able to transmit ground truthed street condition data. (These vehicles could also be compensated for this service)
3. These real-time survey data can be stored on the city{block}-chain to keep track of current street conditions.
4. Over time, as different street segments wear and tear differently, each street segment has a smart contract built into it such that once it falls below some “smoothness or quality threshold” , it releases a “request for repair” . if my condition < smoothness threshold then issue a Request for Repair(RFR)
5. Pavement repair companies can bid on these algorithmically generated RFR’s.
6. The company that wins a bid to repair must complete the street repair within some set of generally acceptably parameters (time, cost etc). During this time, any complaints registered against this repair company can be attached to its profile and affects future bids.
7. The affected street segment is closed for the duration of repair.
8. Once repair is complete, the road is open and re-surveyed by vehicles that pass over it.
9. The first “n” surveys determine if the repair-work is successful or not. The street segment then credits the pavement repair company with agreed upon $$$ or deductions in case of poor work.
10. Citywide street maintenance can be distributed evenly if streets are able to exchange funds within certain community districts. Public funds are therefore allocated more equitably and efficiently based on a literal Ground Truth consensus mechanism.

Here is what the outcome of this may look like:

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. — JFK September 12, 1962.