Your driver’s seat: the upholstered stage for unfortunate events like spilt coffee scorching your thighs or that final swipe of lipstick becoming a jagged streak across your cheek. The culprit behind such vehicular chaos? Potholes.
Granted those vexing asphalt craters are a fact of life, but the Montreal arm of agency Taxi has given people the power to report the hazards and alert fellow drivers with Pothole Season, a free iPhone app and website that turns hunting down those road hazards into sport: Challenge your friends to see who can track down the most potholes and the coveted title of the season’s best pothole hunter could be yours. The app utilizes Google Maps to allow users to pinpoint and tag potholes in any city and also sends an email to the local government office tipping them off to your discoveries. So far, people have reported 5,997 potholes and counting.
For anyone thinking, “They’re just potholes–get over it,” Taxi pulled off a PR stunt to really drive home how much you need this app in your life: Smack-dab in the center of Montreal, a red sedan jutted from the road at a 45-degree angle with the better part of its front buried deep in a mammoth pothole. Not an agency for cutting corners, Taxi’s hoax went for the whole shebang with caution tape, police cars, and safety flares, which gave tourists and passersby something to gawk at–and much more to the point behind the stunt–talk about.
