• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Gig workers with smartphones can help set infrastructure priorities

September 14, 2021 by David Barret Leave a Comment

Maury Blackman
Contributor

Share on Twitter

Maury Blackman has led high-growth tech companies for more than 25 years and is currently CEO of Premise, a global platform that democratizes the way actionable data is sourced and used by organizations in over 125 countries.
More posts by this contributor

  • How Governments Will Change To Better Serve Citizens In 2016
  • How The White House Is Leading The National Effort On Civic Innovation

With all the focus on whether Congress will enact a major infrastructure law to rebuild the United States’ roads, bridges, railways, etc., nobody seems to be paying attention to the elephant in the room: Even if the legislation is passed, where do we begin? You might be surprised to learn that the gig economy has an app for that.

We can and should hire professional consultants and other experts to review our infrastructure systems to see what needs the most immediate attention, but the sheer number of roads, bridges, dams and other critical infrastructure in the U.S. makes the job of prioritizing daunting.

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2021 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, there are over 4 million miles of public roads, 617,000 bridges, 91,000 dams and 140,000 rail miles in the U.S. These are massive statistics.

So as soon as an infrastructure bill passes, the big questions will be: Where do we begin, and how do we set priorities — expeditiously and at minimum cost, at least for the first step? The next step would be to bring in professional engineers and experts to begin the rebuilding process.

There are some obvious examples of infrastructure systems needing immediate, prioritized attention (see the Sidney Sherman Bridge in Houston, which had to be shut down a few years ago for a corroded bridge bearing and was recently classified as “structurally deficient”).

Fortunately, there is another massive statistic out there that can help: 216 million. That is the approximate number of U.S. adults that own a smartphone. Pew Research Center recently found that 85% of all U.S. adults own a smartphone, which, needless to say, is the highest it’s ever been. Even enlisting just a small percentage of the 216 million smartphone users out there can help immensely with this task.

Federal, state and local governments can and should consider the awesome (and relatively inexpensive) power of our smartphones and the gig economy. Gig workers can be enlisted to use the smartphones that they already own to provide inspection data and photographs of the key identified roads, bridges, dams and rails in the 50 states. The data and photos they collect can then be instantly transmitted to a national database for review and evaluation by professional engineers and consultants.

I know this can be done because my colleagues and I have done this before. We tap into a worldwide network of gig workers (data collectors or data contributors) operating from an open source app and with full transparency.

Our projects have involved contributors photographing and documenting sewer access points, bridges, water access points and other infrastructure systems. We even partnered with a major nonprofit on behalf of USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance to bolster its Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Program by providing rapid WASH needs assessments wherein our contributors can be mobilized on an emergency basis to provide photographs and other data on water access, sanitation and hygiene in Colombia.

Why can’t we do the same for bridges, roads, tunnels and other infrastructure here in the U.S.? This technology needs to be scaled, and we know it can be done.

It’s simple — and the solution is in plain sight. Our smartphones and gig workers allow us to set priorities using their photos and input from what their eyes are seeing, and then professional experts can follow up to begin implementation. There are already provisions in the Senate bill that could provide funding for this type of advanced technology research. And there is an ongoing need, even after repairs are done, to monitor the condition of our highways, bridges and tunnels.

Using this gig-worker-enabled smartphone technology will not only help our federal, state and local governments set priorities quickly; it will also allow thousands of everyday Americans to be part of the rebuilding process. This has the added benefit of democratizing the job of fixing our infrastructure and creating a grassroots movement of people using their own smartphones to help rebuild and repair U.S. infrastructure for the current and future generations.

Source Link Gig workers with smartphones can help set infrastructure priorities

David Barret
David Barret

Related posts:

  1. Philippines defense minister says U.S. treaty needs comprehensive review
  2. U.S. House panel to vote on pre-school, child care and tuition-free community college
  3. Central banks of Honduras, Guatemala eye digital currencies as El Salvador launches bitcoin
  4. Fire in N.Macedonian COVID-19 hospital kills at least 10

Filed Under: News

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • What Alternatives Are There To The Big Bang Model?
  • Magnetic Flip Seen Around First Photographed Black Hole Pushes “Models To The Limit”
  • Something Out Of Nothing: New Approach Mimics Matter Creation Using Superfluid Helium
  • Surströmming: Why Sweden’s Stinky Fermented Fish Smells So Bad (But People Still Eat It)
  • First-Ever Recording Of Black Hole Recoil Captured During Merger – And You Can Listen To It
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version