Recently I saw a post promoting fixmystreet.com from Pencaitland Community Council, which was followed up with a tweet from @ELC saying that it would be better if we all used the council’s in house online reporting form.
So I thought I would give both a try. One issue that has irked me for years is the state of the cobbled sets on Dunbar High Street. These sets form the edging to the paved areas and, where they remain, form the attractive informal crossings at various points on the High Street. I went out and took a few snaps and hunted down the form.
It takes a few seconds to find the the ELC online form using google or from the council website:
https://selfservice.eastlothian.gov.uk/Ef3_Live/template/roadrepair.html
However, the first obstacle was that unless you are already registered, you cannot submit a problem (fair enough the system needs a real contact point to follow up.) The system is quite slow to start and takes more than 5 seconds to return the next screen [1. When I tried it later it was taking 15-30 seconds to return the next screen]. The process requires a pretty formal registration, by today’s website standards, and also requires you add your home address too – when an email or phone number would probably suffice. At this point the system threw the first error (it could not find my address and gave an inexplicable system error.) But as the rest of the form was now showing, I duly completed it. Suspecting it might fail I took preemptive action and copied the text. Clicking submit made the page hang. There was no opportunity to upload the pictures I had taken, and there was no way to locate precisely the problem. In my case I hope the description was clear – but I can see this being an issue for an officer searching for dangerous potholes on remote rural roads.
Turning to fixmystreet.com, it took a little less time (I copied and pasted my text), but I made 3 reports for each of the crossings. I was able to pin point the crossings, but when I clicked the submit too hastily on the 2nd, I was unable to reposition an erroneoulsy positioned marker. Apart from which the process was very smooth. There are options to share and follow up the report. The report and updates are public, so you can view other issues and their status, unlike the council’s system – which appears to go into a black hole.
There is also an RSS feed which can be restricted to the ward level. fixmystreet.com is a MySociety service and can be tailored / white labelled for councils and integrated into fault management systems.