This Saturday a few hardcore Oakland residents and Spot.Us community members braved the rain to hunt for potholes.

I often say that there is no better way to learn a city than biking around it. It’s faster than walking, but lets you feel the environment. And when you are searching for potholes – you need to feel the road.

The goal was to populate a map of Oakland with problem spots using See Click Fix. This map will be coupled with an Oakland Tribune story that the Spot.Us community has helped to support. When this story is published (later this month) it will be participatory on two fundamental levels. Some community members donated money to finance the piece and others donated time to help report the story.

Our reporter Sean Maher is working on the piece now.

Along my bike ride I found the mother of all potholes! As I was jotting down the location a man noticed my admiration of the dangerous ditch and said he saw a car bust its wheel on it only yesterday. (See the flickr set below, the second image is a video).

This is a perfect example of how journalism can be participatory in several ways. People often say that Spot.Us is “citizen journalism.” I personally am not a fan of the term but I do greatly believe in participatory journalism – that the public should be a part of informing each other and ourselves. In some cases that means collecting our fiscal resources to hire a journalist to act as a representative. That is what we\’ve done with Sean Maher who is doing research on the fate of Oakland Streets. But in other cases it means donating time – as is the case with our Oakland bike ride.

When Spot.Us first put up the map there were only three or four potholes reported. Then we started promoting the \”We Hella Hate Potholes\” bike event with the video below.

Even just promoting the event reports starting trickling in. Just before the bike event there was just over a dozen pothole reports.

And after our pothole search.

More pictures below.

The following is the written experience of one of our volunteer bike riders!

…It was a lot of fun, getting lost in Oakland searching for potholes, eventually coming upon a street I recognized and re-orienting myself from there, waving hello to kids that I passed playing on the street as they made good use of their Saturday.  For me, it wasn\’t just an event to help drivers and bikers in Oakland, but was also something that energized my soul as I gave back to my community, while being and interacting with it.

…The most pothole-ridden areas we came across several times were intersections.  One could not cross the street without falling into several potholes, some 6-8 inches deep.I also noticed that while looking for potholes was a worthwhile activity – and something I might do in my leisure time – fixing potholes won\’t magically make the streets of Oakland biker-friendly.  There were a lot of streets that didn\’t have large potholes to be filled in, but were so broken up that my jaw shivered and teeth rattled as I traveled them.  Those I didn\’t mark, but would love to see if there\’s a map out there marking streets that haven\’t been repaved in 40-80 years.  It could be cool to have an city-wide map marking different levels of Oakland street severity that citizens could mark up.

Related posts:

1. Do You Hella Hate Potholes? Let it Show!
2. Spot.Us Story in the Oakland Tribune: Cost of potholes in Oakland soars as funding erodes
3. The Great Bike Pothole Search of Oakland
4. Connecting the dots
5. A Busy Three Days