Council using AI to help it detect potholes

A council with an £800m road maintenance backlog will use AI to help it detect potholes.

Cambridgeshire County Council says its number of weekly reported defects peaked at 2,892 in February.

The authority has begun a £100,000 contract for software that "provides automated highway maintenance inspections".

Cameras would be fitted to inspection vehicles and AI would identify defects such as potholes, a council spokesperson said.

They continued: "The footage is then stored and can be reviewed by officers to support thorough post-inspection checks.

"The next stage of the project is to have the technology fully integrated with our works ordering system. This would increase the efficiency of our day-to-day highway maintenance operations."

Responsible for maintaining 4,600km (2,858 miles) of roads, the council's leader has previously admitted it would be "pretty much impossible" to restore them all to a good condition.

The network includes so-called soil-affected roads - built on peat - that have buckled, which the authority has claimed can cost four times as much to repair as standard ones.

Papers which were submitted to the council's highways committee in January described an overall roads maintenance backlog of £800m, £500m of which would be for those peatland roads.

The contract for the system began earlier this year.

Maintenance of Cambridgeshire's roads was recently ranked as "amber" by the government.

A council spokesperson said the number of defects being reported each week in Cambridgeshire had dropped since February, with 830 reports received in the week ending 29 March.

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