The Right of Way
This site tells you which agency is responsible and keeps a public record. It is not connected to any government system. You still have to contact the agency yourself, we'll hand you the phone number, form, and a pre-written message to do it in about a minute. For anything dangerous right now, call 911 or 511.
Who fixes
this one?
Reports sent to the wrong agency don't get forwarded, they get closed. Find the spot on the map and we'll work out the state, county, municipality, and road classification, then name the authority that actually has to fix it.
Search an address to jump the map nearby, or use your location. Drop the pin on the actual defect as precisely as possible. The pin is moved onto the road centreline, so the record points at pavement rather than at anyone’s home.
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Click anywhere to drop a pin.
How we determined this
Everything reported here
Public, dated, recorded to the block rather than to an address. A second person reporting the same defect adds weight to the record already on file instead of creating a duplicate.
Locations are rounded to roughly one city block. Zoom in to separate grouped reports.
Records are public. House numbers, phone numbers and email addresses are stripped automatically; personal names cannot be detected, so leave them out.
Who actually fixes things
Median days from first report to a confirmed fix. An agency isn't ranked until it has at least five records, one report is not a statistic. Only fixes verified by several separate people count.
Targets are conventional, not legal deadlines: municipal 14 days, county 21, state 30. Agencies, if a figure here is wrong, use the correction form on any record and we will respond within three working days.
Keep the record
public.
The Right of Way is independent, free to use, and funded by voluntary contributions. Support helps cover hosting, security, verification, maintenance, and the public road-record data behind the site.
Choose any amount from $2 to $500. Stripe suggests $10, but the amount is entirely up to you.
Choose an amountContribute $5 each month. You can manage or cancel the recurring contribution through Stripe at any time.
Give $5 monthlyNo ads and no sale of personal information. The project will not fund itself by profiling visitors or selling their data.
No pay-to-remove. Contributions cannot remove, hide, promote, or suppress a road record.
No donor influence. Donors receive no control over rankings, corrections, disputes, moderation, or which agencies appear.
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If a map, form, sign-in, or submission stops working, tell us here. This goes to a private moderation inbox and does not become part of the public road record.
Protected by human verification and rate limiting. Your email is used only if we need details about this problem.
How this works
We are not a government service and we do not forward anything. Every report you log here stays here. The site exists because the hard part of reporting a road defect isn't writing the complaint, it's working out which of three or four possible governments owns that particular stretch of pavement, and reports sent to the wrong one get closed rather than forwarded.
What we do. You drop a pin. We ask the Census Bureau which state, county, and municipality that point falls in, and OpenStreetMap what road it is and whether it carries a route number. In thirteen states we then read the transport department's own maintenance records, which say outright who is responsible for that particular stretch, so you are not asked to identify a route marker at all. Everywhere else we work it out from the road class and the boundaries. From that we name the responsible authority, give you their contact route and a pre-written message, and keep a dated public record so a defect that gets ignored has a paper trail with a number on it.
What we can get wrong. Where a state publishes its maintenance records we use them and do not have to guess. Everywhere else we are inferring, OpenStreetMap coverage is thin in rural areas, route numbers are sometimes missing or stale, and that is why we ask you to confirm against the sign actually posted. Census boundaries are authoritative but a road on a boundary line can be genuinely ambiguous. When we're unsure we say so rather than guessing.
Privacy. No house numbers are ever stored or shown, records are kept to the hundred-block, because a pothole belongs to a street and not to whoever lives beside it. The pin you drop is moved onto the centreline of the road before anything is written down, so the stored point identifies a public roadway and not a building. Where we cannot match a road (a pin in a park or open ground), the coordinate is instead rounded to about 110 metres, roughly a city block, because an unmatched point could sit over a house. Descriptions are scrubbed for anything shaped like a street address, phone number, or email address, in the browser and again on the server. Personal names cannot be detected reliably by any pattern, so we don't claim to strip them, if one slips through, use the correction link on the record and we will remove it.
Corrections. Every record has a correction link. Anyone can use it; if you write from a .gov address we treat it as an official dispute, mark the record disputed while we look, and aim to respond in three working days.
Common questions
Who do I report a pothole to?
It depends who maintains that specific road, which is usually a city or village, a county highway department, or the state DOT. The same street name can change hands mid-block, and a report sent to the wrong agency is generally closed rather than forwarded. Drop a pin above and we work it out, reading the transport department's own maintenance records in the thirteen states that publish them and using US Census boundaries and OpenStreetMap road data everywhere else.
Does this site report the pothole for me?
No. We are not connected to any government system and we do not forward reports. We tell you which agency is responsible, give you their phone number, reporting form, or email, and write the message for you. You send it yourself.
How do I know if a road is city, county, or state maintained?
In the thirteen states whose transport department publishes maintenance records, you do not need to know: the site reads the official record for that stretch and tells you. Everywhere else you are reading clues, and the biggest one is easy to get backwards. A route shield tells you the road carries a numbered route. It does not tell you who looks after the pavement. Several states draw a formal line between a state route, which is the designation, and a state highway, which is what the state actually maintains, and inside city limits the municipality often maintains the route itself. Wisconsin calls those connecting highways. Outside city limits a numbered route is usually the state's. A county route marker means the county. No marker usually means the local municipality, though county parkways and park roads are common exceptions, and in Virginia, North Carolina, West Virginia and Delaware the state DOT maintains most local roads directly. Jurisdiction genuinely varies state by state, so where we are inferring rather than reading a record, we say how confident we are.
Which states does it work best in?
It covers all fifty. Thirteen are backed by official maintenance records rather than inference: Wisconsin, Illinois, New York, Texas, North Carolina, Virginia, Washington, Maryland, Indiana, Connecticut, Iowa, New Hampshire and Vermont. In those the answer comes from the agency's own data. In the rest it is worked out from road class and boundaries, and the site tells you how confident it is.
Is it free to report a road defect here?
Yes. Free, no advertising, and no sale of personal information. Records are stored to the hundred-block, never to a house number.
How long should a pothole repair take?
There is no universal legal deadline. We use conventional comparison targets of 14 days for municipal roads, 21 for county, and 30 for state highways, and we measure from the date somebody confirms they actually contacted the agency, not from when the defect was logged here.