Our office is a part of the City of Syracuse that helps facilitate change – change that will result in improved deliverables for the City’s constituents and change that would improve efficiency in our City’s operations. During last summer, the Parks department and API worked to achieve the latter - to update paper processes to maximize efficiency and improve data collection, which in turn achieved the former - to better serve the constituents in the City.
During peak COVID lockdown, the Superintendent of Parks Grounds Maintenance Peter Bardou approached api with a request to generate a process that would bring their paper-based work orders used to service city parks to a digital version informed by route optimization and data collected. Working closely with the Parks Superintendent Peter Bardou, we began discussing how things were currently being done and what we could improve to increase efficiency and improve servicing of the parks. One of the main items we focused on was mapping parks in the City of Syracuse and re-routing parks servicing by the work crews.
Summer Routing
There are more than 100 parks in the City of Syracuse that fall under the purview of the Parks maintenance department, with regular services including (but not limited to) litter pick up, debris removal, fixing broken items, and coordinating special events within the parks in the summer and snow removal and salting in the winter. The Parks Department has been using paperwork orders populated every day with which parks need servicing. Before we were brought on, there were several key parks that needed to be serviced regularly, but getting to all the parks in an efficient way was difficult as it was based on the knowledge of the staff to figure out what to do each day and they have limited staff – there is one staff member per 43 park acres in the City.
Example of the paper work order.
The first task we helped with was mapping all the parks in an interactive Google MyMaps, making it easier to group the parks so that work teams were not driving all over the City in a given day. The parks were grouped into three quadrants, roughly distributed based on location and number of parks in each quadrant: North, Southwest, and East. The map included information on the location and acreage in each of the parks and will eventually include information on amenities available at each park. Once these were mapped, we further subdivided the three park quadrants into three subdivisions (i.e., North 1, North 2, and North 3). This enabled the Parks department to route work crews within one of the 9 subdivisions, limiting the distance a work crew would need to travel.
Once the parks were mapped, the next issue that arose was determining how to route servicing of the parks. The parks that need to be serviced change daily and certain parks are priority parks that need to be addressed first. MapQuest has a routing tool that allows you to route up to 26 stops, allowing you to change the order as well as set what stop you want first (if you would like to play with this tool yourself, you can access the route planner at https://www.mapquest.com/routeplanner). This tool allows the Parks Department to generate work order routes the night before the crew goes out based on the parks that need to be serviced while prioritizing certain parks and allowing for changes as needed. If a work crew does not make it to a park in a given day, it is easy to add it to the next day’s work order route in an efficient way. The Parks department feeds in a subset of the parks in each subdivision and selects which parks they want to service each day and the MapQuest tool generates an optimized route.
As a result of this improved routing of park maintenance, the Parks department had the smallest number of negative complaints this past summer, despite more people going outside due to the COVID restrictions. The city’s parks are now serviced at a minimum every other day, although most are serviced every single day. The optimization allowed for the parks department to reduce cost by saving money and time, which led them to be able to purchase additional equipment to improve snow removal.
Winter Routing
All of this work helped improve the summer servicing, but as anyone who is familiar with Central New York knows, snow is a different beast altogether. As the first snowflakes began to fall and temperatures were dropping, the Parks Department brought another challenge for the api team to help them with – how to best route snow removal.
api once again began by helping with mapping, this time drawing the sidewalks in Syracuse city’s parks to calculate the approximate length of sidewalks that need to be cleared every day and to determine which parks need snow removal and which parks do not (those without sidewalks). The sidewalk layer was added to the Google MyMaps of each of the quadrant maps (the North, Southwest, and East maps) as were fire hydrant locations, as crews help to keep snow off of fire hydrants in parks. The parks with sidewalks were recorded in an Excel spreadsheet with the approximate length of sidewalk that would need to be cleared in each.
The Parks Department took the list of parks with sidewalks and divided it further based on the tool needed to clear the snow – machine or blower – and these lists were then fed into the MapQuest routing tool. The Parks Department prioritizes school routes first, then uses the routes generated in MapQuest to clear snow from sidewalks. The Parks Department took their snow removal even further by prioritizing which sidewalks need to get done first (red in the map below) and then circling back to auxiliary sidewalks (yellow in the map below) once they finished with the priority sidewalks. These routes are now used during every snowstorm to keep the approximately 13 miles of sidewalks clear for foot traffic.
Conclusion: Continuous digitization will lead us to better delivery of public services
All of this has helped significantly improve how the Parks department services parks throughout the City every day, even though the department remains stretched thin with all they are responsible for in helping keep our parks operational and clean. api and the Parks Department plan to continue to work together to improve services to the public. Upcoming work involves digitizing the work order information that will populate a dashboard for easily accessible metrics and analyses of the parks and sectors. The Parks Department is an excellent use case of how changing processes can improve the quality of services to the public and improve the efficiency of the work done every day in the City of Syracuse.
