It’s obviously good citizen behaviour to report something that needs fixing to your council, whether it’s a pothole that could cause an accident, or a broken streetlight that has plunged the area into darkness.
But there’s one type of report that isn’t very useful to councils, and in fact brings unnecessary costs and inconvenience: when you tell the council about an issue that’s already been flagged up by someone else.
FixMyStreet has always been helpful in this regard. It was groundbreaking in displaying all reports in public, unlike most council systems when we were first developing it. A user who goes to make a report can see right away if there’s already a pin in that spot, and check whether the existing issue is the same one they were going to add.
Now we’ve taken that concept a step further in some work which was first trialed on Bath & NE Somerset’s implementation of FixMyStreet Pro and is now available to all councils on the Avenue plan.
When a user starts to make a report, the system checks to see if there are any other open reports in the same category within a small radius. If it finds any, you’ll see a prompt, like this:
All similar reports will appear here. If you think one might be identical, but aren’t sure, you can click ‘read more’ to see the full text along with any photos attached to the report:
And if you recognise it as the issue you were about to report, you click the green button and will be given the option to subscribe to it, so you know when it’s being seen to, effectively being kept just as up to date as you would be if you’d made the original report:
If it’s not the same issue, no worries: just click ‘report a new problem’ and you can do just that:
Thank you to Bath & NE Somerset who trialed this feature and provided feedback before we rolled it out to everyone else on the Avenue plan.
We’d been keen to hear from you if you have any feedback or if you’ve seen a reduction in the amount of duplicate reports received.
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Image: Kevin Grieve
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