Development and Operation of a Road Condition Reporting System Using Twitter

Abstract

An increasing number of municipalities are engaging in citizen-participatory / citizen　collaborative city planning, in which citizens and the government work together to solve various community issues. As part of such activities, there has been an increase in the number of cases where citizen reporting systems utilizing ICT devices, such as PCs and smartphones, have been introduced. For example, Chiba City in Chiba Prefecture, Japan began operating an application called Chiba-Repo in 2014, which allows residents to post issues in the city. Currently, a service called My City Report is being developed as an extension of Chiba-Repo. We have jointly developed a road condition reporting system with Hiratsuka City in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, based on a disaster information sharing system using Twitter implemented in our previous study. The system has been operating as an official system of Hiratsuka City, called “Michirepo,” since March 2019. This paper introduces the functions and features of Michirepo, a road reporting system using Twitter, and reports its operation for about three years since the service was launched.