RoadWatch wins Rep. Frank Pallone’s 2025 Congressional App Challenge in New Jersey’s Sixth District

When asked what inspired the creation of RoadWatch, the students said, “Last spring, we were sitting in the car on the way back from a school club meeting as Vaibhav’s mom navigated through the neighborhood, when we hit the same massive pothole we’d dodged every time we came along this route. She sighed and muttered something about how nobody ever fixes these things, and that’s when it clicked for us: why does reporting road damage have to be such a hassle?

“As two high school students who will be driving soon, we spend a lot of time in the front seat observing the road. We started noticing patterns. The same dangerous intersection where drivers always slam their brakes, the stretch of highway with crumbling pavement that never gets repaired, the blind curve where animals frequently cross. These hazards persist because the reporting process is too cumbersome for busy drivers. Nobody wants to pull over, find the right government website, fill out forms, and describe locations. The infrastructure problems just sit there, getting worse.

“We realized that dashcams are already capturing this data as people drive. The technology exists to detect potholes, track accident-prone areas, and monitor road conditions. It just wasn’t being leveraged effectively. That’s what inspired RoadWatch. We wanted to create a system that turns every driver into a road monitoring sensor without requiring any extra effort on their part.

“The concept felt personal because we’re about to become drivers ourselves. We understand the anxiety of learning unfamiliar roads and not knowing which sections require extra caution. By aggregating real-time data from multiple drivers, RoadWatch helps newcomers prepare for hazardous areas while simultaneously giving local governments the detailed information they need to prioritize repairs. It’s a solution that benefits both individual drivers and entire communities, addressing a problem we witnessed firsthand from the passenger seat.”