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A Successful Deployment of the City of Syracuse's Snow Plow Map: What it Does, What We've Learned, and What We Plan to Do

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A Successful Deployment of the City of Syracuse's Snow Plow Map: What it Does, What We've Learned, and What We Plan to Do

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.

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Introducing SYRCityline- transforming resident engagement and quality of service.

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Cityline has always been a portal to communicate with the residents, understand their concerns and find ways to address them, but a strong program is only successful if it continues to meet the needs for which it was intended, and for that, it has to be relevant, easy to use, and efficient.

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Managing Our Public Space With Permits

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So much of city life in Syracuse and in other cities operates in what is known as the “right-of-way,” which is space that is maintained and regulated for public use. Regulating the public right-of-way helps to make sure infrastructure is safe and usable.

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Meet our new Performance Management & Innovation Specialist

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As our Performance Management Fellow Mojdeh will work with City Departments to establish metrics that will be used to measure their operational performance, interview Department employees to understand their processes and data capture methods, and communicate performance insights through data visualizations and dashboards and will manage a city-wide, cross-departmental performance management program.

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Living a Quality Life in Syracuse

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Over the past year, the quality of life project has sought to understand what direction our residents want to see the city drive in by asking “What matters most to your quality of life?”. The idea here is that the city is currently in a car in the middle of a parking lot with 360 degrees of directions to go in. The car is made of numbers, and the parking lot is made of the stories we hear from residents every day. By learning more about quality of life from constituent perspectives, we hoped to narrow down from 360degrees to just a few roads to choose to drive down. 

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Process Mapping: A Tool With Many Uses

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A process map is a tool using a flowchart to illustrate the flow, people, as well as inputs, actions, and outputs of the process in a clear and detailed way. A good process map will reflect the work that is actually done within a given process, not what the intended or imagined workflow might entail. This means in order to build a good process map you should be talking to and learning from the folks that use the process every day, not just the people that oversee the process.