An iPhone mounted to a windshield and a drive around town. That is the pitch Daniel Laufer made to Jim Thorpe Borough Council on Thursday night and it may be enough to change how the borough manages every pothole, cracking road or dirty speed limit sign in town.

Laufer, a representative of Vialytics, a software and artificial intelligence company headquartered in Edison, New Jersey, presented the technology to council during its monthly work session. The borough has already begun a pilot program using the system.

The concept is straightforward. As a municipal vehicle travels borough streets, an iPhone mounted to the windshield photographs the road surface every 10 to 12 feet. AI then does the rest including grading roads, mapping distress points and inventorying assets, all without an engineer setting foot outside.

“Our AI is going to replace an engineer having to go out, or citizens having to call and complain about potholes,” Laufer said. “The AI is going to pick up all of this distress on the surface of the roadway.”

The system grades roads on a one-to-five scale using the European EMI standard, identifying up to 15 types of road distress — from critical potholes to early-onset cracking — pinpointed by individual latitude and longitude. A color-coded heat map of borough streets updates continuously. The AI also automatically inventories street signs, manholes, storm drains and, as of last week, damaged lane markings.

For boroughs that have long struggled with rising road repair costs and flat liquid fuels funding, Laufer said the shift from reactive to proactive maintenance is the central promise of the technology.

“A lot of what is done in road and asset management is typically done via pen and paperwork,” he said. “We’re playing whack-a-mole with our potholes every year. The work that the public works team is charged with doing is often very reactive.”

Council Vice President Mike Yeastedt said the grading system would give his department something it has never had, an objective basis for deciding which roads get repaired first.

“When we get to doing liquid fuels and we say what section of the streets we are going to do, there will be an actual grade,” he said. “If we’re disputing which piece to do, one of them might have a five, the other might have a 4.5 and then you have the basis for why you’re going to pick one or the other.”

The system is fully eligible for liquid fuels funding, meaning the borough would not need to draw from other department budgets to cover the cost. Vialytics operates in 34 states and partners with more than 40 municipalities in Pennsylvania alone, including Honesdale and Jessup, as well as larger communities such as Lebanon and Chambersburg.

Beyond road grading, Yeastedt said the asset management component addresses a longstanding gap in how the borough tracks its infrastructure, one that currently requires specialized equipment just to locate buried utilities.

“Before, we used to have the Trimble unit with all the software in it to record assets,” he said. “Now you can take the phone, get out of the vehicle, go over to it, stand there and locate that asset. We’re working on this now for the water department so you’ll know where every curb stop is, where every water line is. We want to continue that to the sewer department and to the streets department.”

Laufer said the platform also addresses a vulnerability familiar to small municipalities, institutional knowledge that exists only in one person’s head.

“Worst case scenario, there’s information that just lives on the back of someone’s hand,” he said. “Having a system like this allows for more transparency, more easy communication of data that’s available to everyone, instead of constantly having to call and ask people where these assets are or what work was done.”

The technology requires no hardware installation. Borough vehicles receive a windshield phone mount, a black dashboard blanket to reduce camera glare and a smart button that lets drivers flag problem areas without stopping the vehicle. Software updates are pushed automatically.

“Just like the Domino’s app, we just update the app through the app store, and boom we have a new and improved AI to use,” Laufer said.

Council members and borough staff raised a range of questions.

Fire Commissioner Charles Sgrillo asked whether fire hydrants could be cataloged in the system.

Laufer said the AI does not detect hydrants automatically, but that any borough employee could photograph and log one manually.

“I can go up to the fire hydrant, open an app, take a picture, and boom it’ll exist there as an asset in the system,” he said.

Laufer said the borough retains full data ownership throughout the partnership and that all data can be exported to the borough’s own GIS maps at any time. If the borough stops using the application, Vialytics holds the data for six months before deleting it.

All images captured by the system are processed under global data privacy standards. Faces, license plates and even pets, he said, are automatically blurred.