Typically, I rely on Google Maps or Waze to navigate, but today I’m switching gears to an old-school approach—no satellite navigation for the next 20 minutes. Instead, I’ll navigate using just road signs and memory, which feels almost retro in 2026.
However, the rest of this journey will embrace the new school of technology. I park my car on a small residential street in Cradley Heath, Sandwell, and prepare my phone for an unusual task. I position it horizontally in the holder—a small but notable change for me, as I usually keep it vertical—and launch an app called Stan (short for Safer Travel Around Neighbourhoods). Once I start recording, the phone screen goes dark and my car is transformed into a moving pothole detector.
I chose Sandwell specifically because it received a coveted ‘Green’ rating for road health from the government in January, making it one of only two West Midlands boroughs to earn this status—the other being Coventry. Meanwhile, other areas like Birmingham, Solihull, and the Black Country were rated ‘Amber’ in the government’s traffic light system, which measures the condition of roads and pothole prevalence across local authorities.
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With Sandwell’s excellent rating in mind, I was curious to see how AI technology might independently assess its roads. I drove a 10.14 km (6.3 miles) route diagonally across the borough, from the Dudley border to Great Bridge, to ensure the app captured a substantial sample of roadway conditions.
The overall results were mostly positive. The AI-generated driving ‘heat map’ displayed extensively green zones, indicating good road conditions, with only occasional small yellow patches. However, the detailed analysis identified 13 road defects: eight cracks in the tarmac, two joint failures, one area with water pooling, and two potholes—including one on the major A457 Oldbury Ringway.
These findings highlight that even in areas deemed the safest by government standards, road hazards are not completely absent. Such issues can appear unexpectedly, sometimes making smooth travel impossible to guarantee.