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).
Syracuse is no stranger to snow – historically we see an average of 124 inches a year and tend to be in the top 5 snowiest big cities in the country (from the Golden Snow Globe Competition). In an effort to share how we operate during a storm, we developed a snowplow map that shows when a street was last plowed.
Our Deputy Chief Innovation & Data Officer, Conor Muldoon, wrote a post outlining what led up to our current snowplow map and the potential impact of it right before we launched the tool in December here.
We have had several snow storms since the launch of the City’s Snow Plow map (ESRI’s Winter Weather Operations tool) the first week of December 2021. We successfully launched the tool to the public with the first large storm in January, tracking the plowed status of streets for three days, and saw around 12,000 hits over the course of the storm to the public viewer. We continue to maintain high engagement during the storms after, seeing consistent views of the tool throughout the storm’s length.
In 2018, the Office of Accountability, Performance, and Innovation developed an in-house web application to track the City’s fleet of snow plow trucks and map street segments that had been plowed during winter storms in order to communicate to residents when their street had been plowed. The tool was exceptionally well-received and played an important role in the City’s communication strategy around an important public service delivery. However, last year the system experienced significant challenges with the underlying sensor technology and ran into limitations in the frequency of the network provider’s communications - resulting in performance issues that made the much-anticipated snow plow map no longer functional.
Despite extensive attempts to work around the inherent technical limitations, it became apparent that it was time to develop a more robust solution.
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…
For the second year in a row, the City of Syracuse partnered with Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies and AT&T to run a civic hackathon. More than 30 teams and 90 people signed up to participate, and ultimately 16 teams submitted projects. The winners had creative solutions that were well-conceived and built out enough that we could get an idea of how to implement in the future.
Last week, we hosted to Snow Safety Summit to get public feedback and ideas about these issues, with our biggest focus on clearing sidewalks. We structured this event differently than past meetings. It was “open house” style and consisted of several different stations where people could weigh in on different winter related topics. Approximately 150 people attended the Summit, and we were able to collect valuable feedback that we have already sorted through. You can review the ideas, suggestions, and comments that we received on our open data portal, DataCuse.
Here are the biggest takeaways from the Summit...
