Evaluating Road Hazard Maintenance Efficiency Using Citizen Science Data to Improve Road Safety

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper describes a method to evaluate the efficiency of traffic agencies regarding road maintenance.

 

Tabel 1

Table 1 shows the road length for each office. It is obvious that the road length varies per road office. That means that an office with a higher number of kilometres will be confronted with more complaints than an office with a lower number of kilometres. However, this difference in road length is not taken as an exposure measure in your efficiency indicator.

 

Tabel 5

What does ‘K’ mean?

 

Lines 225/226

Your conclusion is not correct. Figure 3 only shows the relationship between the number of complaints and the processing time. In this figure, the local agency is not taken into account.

Please adapt your conclusion or add a figure which shows the three variables together (complaint – processing time – local agency).

 

Lines 233 – 239

The missing point in this approach is the number of kilometres which is maintained per road agency. The efficiency indicator does not include the work load of a road office: more kilometres means more work.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Very interesting and good article. Maybe you could shorten the section of the local specifities as they are not so important for international readers (line 31-42). Instead you could be more general, as the problem occurs everywhere. The section of literature review could be more specific. Maybe as kind of matrix, where the rows represent some items and the lines the relevant sources. In this way the reader will get a nice overview, which aspects are often covered in literature and which not.

The excel power query function is a very basic approach. It is appropriate to showcase your idea. But maybe you could spend some ideas how to get more specific results by various kinds of sematic analyses.

However, well done.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors, 

I thank you for the opportunity to read your manuscript entitled "Evaluating road hazard maintenance efficiency using citizen science data for improving road safety".

The research is interesting and topical; the paper addresses the topic of road safety with reference to a process to evaluate operational efficiency in terms of maintaining road hazards by analyzing citizen scientist-based data.

In Section 1 (Introduction) the goals of the research are specified.

The 5 figures and 6 tables are always cited in the text.

Below are my major revisions hoping that they will be helpful to you in improving and enhancing the paper:

·       At the end of section 1, I would include a description of the organization and structure of the paper (reminder). This will help the reader to read the paper.

·       In section 2 (Literature Review), I suggest that the paragraph addressing the topic of machine learning and deep learning between line 83 and line 90 be made more explicit. Several authors are cited in the text but it is not clear what contribution each work makes. I suggest making the contribution of each author more explicit where possible. 

·       At the end of section 2, I would try to better highlight the contribution of the research compared to the state of the art. What are the innovative issues? 

·       In section 2, line 122, there is a typo (double full stop at the end of the sentence).

·       Regarding the state of the art analysis in section II, I suggest reading this paper:

"A new methodology for accidents analysis: The case of the state road 36 in Italy. DOI 10.2495/TDI-V5-N3-278-290”. In this paper you can find useful insights about road safety to improve your research by considering a case study in Italy (analysis of accidents, social costs, community impacts and possible solutions).

·       In section 6 (Conclusions) I would suggest better explaining possible research developments by giving more precise directions.

Thank you and good luck.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors,

thank you for considering my suggestions. I hope my recommendations have helped to improve your research.

I have seen that you have responded in a timely and comprehensive manner to the six requests for further study /editing.

Therefore, I believe that the research is publishable without further modification.