A golf cart rigged with a camera has been turning heads in Moncton.
The city is calling it a “pimped up” golf cart, equipped with cameras, GPS, and software to detect surface defects, or in this case, cracks in the sidewalk.
“This technology here is really the most efficient and most consistent way of rating your sidewalks on the market today,” says project engineer Rene Lagace.
City sidewalks are usually assessed once or twice a year. The cart allows the city to assess its 450 kilometres of sidewalk in a fraction of the time it used to take when employees would walk the same distance, taking notes.
The cart is driven by Epiphane Yehouenou, who works for a company based out of Montreal. So far this year, he has also mapped the sidewalks of Mississauga and Sudbury, Ont.
“I enjoy this work, I do it with my heart, I have to do it very well,” says Yehouenou.
The city has used similar technology in the past to analyze its roads and Lagace says it allows crews to identify and fix problem areas much faster.
“This first step is again, identifying what that number is, how much sidewalk we need to renew and after that we can present that to council,” says Lagace.
Yehouenou should be finished charting the city in the next week or so and the results of his sidewalk survey are expect by December.
With files from CTV Atlantic's Jonathan MacInnis
