We love it when citizens put our platform to creative use. That’s why we were psyched to see Transportation Nation, a project of WNYC, make use of SeeClickFix for identifying all of the abandoned bicycles in New York. They located a lot of abandoned bikes this way, so the exercise was valuable in and of itself. However, it also demonstrated the value of SeeClickFix for cities in receiving citizen reports.

WNYC received examples of over 500 abandoned bikes from listeners. However, the city was not prepared to respond to electronic submissions of the problems, and encouraged the radio station to phone in each of of the problems individually. This process took FOURTEEN MINUTES to report just one bike. This is more patience than any one citizen can rightfully be expected to have, and this is for just one of the hundreds of bikes that were reported to WNYC.   Extrapolate outward from this one anecdote, and you can begin to realize how many citizen concerns are going unresolved because of the outdated systems used by too many municipalities.

On the other hand, citizens in places like Washington DC and Oakland CA who take advantage of SeeClickFix can do their civic duty in about a minute. It’s no wonder that more and more citizens are taking advantage of our services, and more local governments are signing up every day for SeeClickFix.