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.
The public tool is color-coded to show the recency of plow on streets. The brightest color (yellow) is the most recent, while the darkest color (dark blue) is the longest ago. We also include a layer that shows the location of illegally parked cars (cars either parked on the wrong side of the road or double-parked), to explain why streets are not plowed. Plows will not travel down streets with illegally parked cars to prevent damage to personal vehicles, however, this also prevents snow clearance.
The internal tool is used by operations to track key information and metrics, including identifying where has recently been plowed, where illegally parked cars are located, % of routes that have been touched in a given time frame, and how many miles have been traveled. There are filters for priority and emergency routes, vehicles, and time frames. These metrics allow operations to monitor how they are doing clearing snow and identify areas that have not yet been serviced. They also allow operations to keep track of what roads have been skipped due to illegally parked cars so they know to go back and service them again. Additionally, when requests through phone calls or our SyrCityLine come through requesting plows, snow operations have insight into these areas as to why a street may not have been plowed yet.
We continue to iterate with those involved in the snow operations for the City to improve metrics and add additional information as is needed. One important tool we hope to build with the layers generated in Velocity is a historical tool for DPW that allows them to identify the number of times a street was plowed during a storm and list the times the road was serviced. Another part will generate what the public-facing snow map looked at a historical time. Our hope is that this will provide snow operations with the ability to improve services and identify areas that are currently problematic during snowstorms.
We are also hoping to create a similar public-facing map and internal dashboard for our sidewalk clearance program, showing which sidewalks in the City have been cleared and at what time.
This tool has been very useful for our snow operations team and the public, giving some transparency into operations and identifying areas where we can improve service to the public. We continue to work on the whole operation from the routes to the sensors to the public communication and hope to have an even better tool in the next year.
