After a particularly harsh winter, the City of Kitchener is considering using artificial intelligence for its pothole program. Councillor Paul Singh put forward a motion during Monday night’s council meeting asking staff to explore opportunities to enhance the city’s road repair efforts. Those improvements could include using AI for data collection, tracking and reporting. Fellow councillor Scott Davey praised Singh’s idea. “It’s not that far of a stretch to imagine the sum amount of work - a staff [member] or an automatic camera will be able to take a picture of a hole in the road and automatically, from that the camera, be able to geolocate where it is. It will be able to determine the depth, the width of the hole,” Davey said. “It will be able to know, because of the geolocation, what the classification of the road is because we have different legislated timelines for pothole filling based on how heavy the traffic is, how busy the road is. It should be able to upload that into a database and do the prioritization.” Council voted in favour of the motion. Staff will now be tasked with putting together a report with their options, including recommendations for future budget discussions.
