Papers › Street Sense: Learning from Google Street View
Street Sense: Learning from Google Street View
Suriyan Laohaprapanon, Kimberly Ortleb, Gaurav Sood
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
How good are the public services and the public infrastructure? Does their quality vary by income? These are vital questions---they shed light on how well the government is doing its job, the consequences of disparities in local funding, etc. But there is little good data on many of these questions. We fill this gap by describing a scalable method of getting data on one crucial piece of public infrastructure: roads. We assess the quality of roads and sidewalks by exploiting data from Google Street View. We randomly sample locations on major roads, query Google Street View images for those locations and code the images using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. We apply this method to assess the quality of roads in Bangkok, Jakarta, Lagos, and Wayne County, Michigan. Jakarta's roads have nearly four times the potholes than roads of any other city. Surprisingly, the proportion of road segments with potholes in Bangkok, Lagos, and Wayne is about the same, between .06 and .07. Using the data, we also estimate the relation between the condition of the roads and local income in Wayne, MI. We find that roads in more affluent census tracts have somewhat fewer potholes.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections