What Edinburgh really needs to do is take a healthy dose of Boston-style, Urban Mechanics, one of those livewire approaches that has issued from the Mayor's Office and that is quietly determined to 'microtask' or 'crowd-source' and leverage the awesome capabilities of hundreds of smart phones.

Urban Mechanics has some truly fine things being quietly grown up, among them MIT Technology Review highlights the joy of Street Bump or the Boston Urban Mechanic Profiler as City of Boston’s newest mobile phone app to help Boston residents improve neighborhoods. 

The prototype app was developed in partnership with Venetian-born Fabio Carrera, a local professor who has partnered with the City on a variety of projects that focus on collecting and using data to improve City operations.

Taking advantage of the sensors on smart phones, Street Bump provides the City with a near-real time picture of Boston’s road conditions and the location of its potholes. Street Bump should give the City the information it needs to make your travels through our city even easier.

"Right now, the app is in prototype form, simply recording and uploading data from the sensors.  In collaboration with InnoCentive and  Liberty Mutual, we will launch a challenge in the spring of 2011 to design the algorithms needed to convert that data into actionable information.

Familiar to Edinburgh residents?
"Since 2009, residents have been able to report potholes, graffiti, and other nuisances using the Citizens' Connect  iPhone and Android app, where users take a photo, submit the image, and that is routed directly to city repair teams.

"Street Bump, released by the city in February, requires no direct user involvement. The app, for Android devices only at the moment, uses GPS data to track a device, detecting potholes by using the built-in accelerometer to sense sudden jolts. When multiple phones report the same jolt, the app identifies a pothole that needs to be repaired.

Nigel Jacob, co-chair of the mayor's office of New Urban Mechanics, says his team was unhappy with the number of false positives that Street Bump produced. "We need someone to do deeper analysis of our data," he says. "The app works well, but it can't tell the difference between a real pothole and a train track."

To improve the app, the city has now posted a bounty of $25,000 on Innocentive.com, a marketplace for crowd sourcing innovation, for a developer to create algorithms that report potholes accurately.

But it doesn't stop there. Take Participatory Chinatown, a 3D immersive game being played to be part of a master planning process for Boston's Chinatown.  Or what about Infrastructure 2.0  for redesigning residential approaches to trash and recyclables?

Edinburgh's focal talk at one point in 2010 was over the inspired hanging of black bags from street railings that provided a less easy picking for scavenging gulls, cats and dogs!

In Boston, a City Worker Ap, launched with the Parks department's arborists in March allows workers to manage their daily work list, access and record information about City infrastructure conditions such as street lights, trees and roads.

Happily, lost in Boston is about helping Bostonians work to make their neighborhoods more visitor friendly and design signs to show key area features. On the other hand  Complete Streets  is that city's effort to improve the flow of people through Boston. Safe bike parking right.

And since the Edinburgh tram works closed down both main and side streets and Council's dislike of all cars, except the city taxis, has closed down so many small escape or alternative routes to alleviate funnelling and jamming traffic, this complete streets approach would be a joy in Edinburgh.

An Education project is also to offer in a one card access to all the resources needed by the young, as in a school ID, library card, community center access, membership and transit pass. Also developing a Backpack as well as Autism/Adaptive technologies apps.

Scottish cities should wake up to new urban  engineering.