S.Q.U.I.D. and the City: An Odyssey in Civic Sensing
My good friend and former co-founder shared the following story on LinkedIn about our work building a low cost street quality sensor. That type of work is radically common sense. Cities don't actually know where all the potholes are and overpay a consultant-industrial complex for suboptimal garbage-in-garbage-out reports that don't actually reflect the operational reality of urban infrastructure. As we grapple with the climate crisis and the massive disruption recked by DOGE, there's an urgent need for us work on urban / civic / gov tech to increase our collective ambition.
As the climate crisis accelerates, so too must our imagination for what infrastructure resilience can look like—from billion-dollar seawalls to $150 DIY sensors on pothole-ridden streets. My cofounder’s story below is a vivid reminder that some of the most powerful innovations aren’t top-down moonshots, but bottom-up hacks that bring systems thinking to the street level—literally.
SQuID (Street Quality Identification Device) was an early effort to do just that: empower cities with real-time, low-cost tools to better understand and care for their critical infrastructure. Nearly a decade later, its mission is more relevant than ever. We need more cities willing to embrace this kind of adaptive, digitally native approach to infrastructure—not as a pilot, but as a standardized protocol. Especially now, as we face worsening climate volatility, these sorts of small-scale interventions can yield outsized impacts.
The post below is more than a retrospective—it’s a call for a new kind of public works ethos. One that treats data like asphalt, lays down civic trust alongside fiberoptic cable, and rebuilds not just roads but relationships between residents, technologists, and government.
On November 3, 2015, as a fresh graduate from NYU's new Applied Urban Science program, I received this email from an official at the City of Syracuse inviting us to prototype our pothole detection technology.
We had just been awarded $30k by the Knight foundation as part of their Prototyping Grant to further develop SQuID (Street Quality Identification Device) ; a low-cost way to digitally survey city streets.
By April 2016, our scrappy team of 3 created 2 kits and a codebase that streamed GPS + Imagery data to the cloud using a $50 Raspberry Pi, a $75 T-Mobile hotspot, and $25 in cables.
Fun Fact : We built SQuID in the same building as Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign headquarters. Little did we know that both would share the same fate.
On April 15th, I shared a podium with the then mayor of Syracuse, Stephanie Miner, to announce SQuID as part of her Infrastructure platform. She was gearing up to run for NY Governor the next year. The event got local press attention.
One headline read "Syracuse brings hipster remedy to ancient problem". I'm still unsure what I did to deserve that label. Maybe it was the vest I had on? I had worn it as a way of channeling Gene Kranz's Apollo mission aesthetic.
Between April 14 - 30th, 2016 - SQUID was mounted on a Syracuse municipal truck. Throughout, I would track it in real time, as it surveyed 548 miles of local streets and streamed 110,000 images of blacktop. I reveled in the delusion of treating it like a mission to survey the equally potholed surface of the Moon.
We used accelerometer data to create a detailed snapshot of citywide street quality and computer vision to detect cracks & potholes.
We charged Syracuse $3,000 for this pilot. Syracuse officials were able to use SQuID data to implement a “dig-once” program to coordinate utility excavations. The city saved $450,000 and created a new infrastructure coordinator role. That's quite the ROI for something called 🦑
We hoped this pilot would "pave the way" to more $ and make such surveying routine to reveal specific parts of the street network that were deteriorating faster than others. This, we pitched, would lead to more enduring street maintenance/design. So far no city in the world has been able to reach this milestone of being able see how quickly their entire street network deteriorates.
Today, there’s a lot of talk about government efficiency. If SQuiD scaled up, I’m convinced that we could have saved many millions (maybe Billions) of taxpayer $$, created new jobs, and contributed to a new paradigm of sustainable and resilient local infrastructure.
10 years on, the dream of getting cities to do low-cost continuous digital surveys of their street network to reform how street & utility maintenance is done, lives on.
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