Our pursuit of innovation
Big snowstorms have serious implications for city operations, with one lesser-known impact being that the Syracuse Fire Department (SFD) has to shovel all of the roughly 5,700 fire hydrants in the city. The Fire Department recognized an opportunity to track the status of hydrant shoveling in real time and, consequently, to better allocate their resources during a storm. So, SFD approached our Office of Analytics, Performance, and Innovation (API).
Roads in the City of Syracuse have it rough. Every day, thousands of cars drive along them, they endure brutal weather conditions and let’s not forget the copious amounts of road salt used to help drivers during the region’s tough winters. During the construction season, the City of Syracuse undertakes road reconstruction projects to repave and patch some of its roads.
But how does the city decide which roads should undergo reconstruction? Earlier this year, API worked with Corey Driscoll Dunham, the Chief Operating Officer of the City of Syracuse, the Department of Public Works (DPW), and the Syracuse Metropolitan Transportation Council (SMTC) to examine the City's road reconstruction process, better understand how factors like race and income are correlated with the roads the city has paved in the past and build safeguards into the process to ensure that historically under-served populations and demographic groups are not overlooked by the city’s road reconstruction efforts.
We use spatial data every day – navigating from point A to point B, delivery of mail and packages to an address, identifying boundaries of our homes. Spatial data is some of the most useful data to communicate information; we can communicate where something is, how far away it is, how we can navigate there, and aggregate to spatial shapes (i.e., your street block or zip code) to identify characteristics of an area. Spatial data is information captured in a shape - think points, lines, or polygons. Information stored in these shapes then allows us to map the information in relation to other information. This can include how close or far away something is, how big or small something is, and how two areas of information compare to something near it (how does your neighbor impact you?).
The City produces spatial data often to help us communicate the narrative of key information to residents. This can vary across a wide variety of topics, from where water main breaks are happening, to what streets are closed for road reconstruction, to what neighborhood an address belongs to, to how close a school is to a resident’s house, or to the last time a snow plow cleared the road a citizen is traveling on. All of this information is communicated clearly and concisely through maps comprised of spatial data. In this post, we will explore several examples of how the City uses spatial data to measure and improve services.
The City of Syracuse is one of the snowiest cities on record within the United States. Given this fact, it was deemed important that the residents of Syracuse should be able to see when their streets were plowed. During snow storms, the City of Syracuse sees an increased number of calls from residents telling us a street was not plowed or inquiring when their street was last plowed. By having a tool like the snow plow map we can be more transparent and open about our operations…
