A new Slop University research poster interviews council road crews across one wet season and finds compliance with an app's pothole-repair ranking eroding week by week, not holding steady.
A wet-season interview study across nine councils finds patch order drifting further from the app's rank each week, not closer
Interviewing the people who hold the patch truck is not how a council’s pothole-repair app expects its own priority ranking to get checked. A new Slop University research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities did exactly that, sitting with road crews across a full wet season to see whether the order they worked in still matched the order the app had set.
Senior Lecturer Ronja Oyelaran and Dr Mirela Hanke interviewed 34 road-maintenance crew members across nine councils, riding along on shifts and coding each patch’s stated rationale against the app’s logged rank at the moment of the job — 341 dispatch-log jobs in total, spanning one wet season. Compliance with the app’s rank order was highest in the season’s first week and fell in almost every week that followed.
An indicator only keeps deciding for you as long as nobody on the ground has a better idea; ours went quiet almost exactly on schedule.
— Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Continuous Improvement
“The crews were never being defiant,” said Senior Lecturer Ronja Oyelaran. “They just noticed, months before we did, which calls turned into complaints.”
The School regards a forecast that survives being checked against the people who act on it as the harder-won kind of finding, and reads the season-long drift less as a failure of the ranking than as a record of how quickly a crew’s own judgement fills whatever gap it leaves.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.7hfxvw.