What does it take to quickly and efficiently clear the roads of winter precipitation in America’s snowiest major city?
Syracuse, New York, which claims that title, uses dozens of snow removal vehicles, plows, and no fewer than three software systems, the city’s operations professionals say. The team has a big job: The city receives an average of 127 inches of snow, or nearly 11 feet, every year.
Syracuse has been implementing Internet of Things and geographic information systems technologies for its snow removal since 2018, said Corey Driscoll Dunham, Syracuse’s chief operations officer. The overhaul of the system was prompted by a huge storm that January, she said.
“Between the mayor, the deputy mayor, our chief policy officer and myself, we spent the entire weekend driving around the city, getting messages through Facebook or text messages or phone calls or, you know, just chasing down complaints left and right about the roads,” Dunham said about the 2018 snowstorm, which lasted for 66 hours, according to news reports.
Dunham said it was clear the city needed a better way to respond to residents and provide some transparency about snow removal. Over the last few years, she; Conor Muldoon, the city’s deputy chief data and innovations officer; and the rest of the operations team have developed the interactive, real-time Syracuse Snow Operations Map.
The city first tried building something in-house, Muldoon said, but by summer 2021, the team looked outward. The three-pronged software approach uses GIS company ESRI’s ArcGIS Velocity product paired with Samsara’s cloud-based location technology, which updates the Snow Operations Map with a plow’s location every few seconds. The third vendor is Rubicon, which offers a platform Syracuse uses year-round for management and routing of snow and waste removal vehicle fleets.
“The Samsara is the underlying platform for knowing where the plows are, ESRI is a platform for ingesting all that information into a dashboard and communicating it out to the public, and then Rubicon is the platform for the drivers to dispatch communications,” Muldoon said.
The real-time tracker allows residents to see which roads have been plowed and when. They can more easily see if the route to work or school is cleared, budget more time for travel, or decide to stay home. The Snow Operations Map also reports when there’s an impediment, like an illegally parked car, that is preventing a plow from going down a certain street.
New York City adds bike lanes, salting progress to its plow tracking
Although New York City has had a map of snow plow progress, PlowNYC, for more than 10 years, the Department of Sanitation (DSNY) updated its operations software in 2023, ahead of predictions that the Northeast would receive higher-than-average levels of precipitation this winter. Its Bladerunner 2.0 platform, launched in December, helps the sanitation department streamline and centralize its prep and response to snow and ice and provides tracking data to help determine how and when to deploy staff.
The Bladerunner software was first launched in 2015, a Department of Sanitation press release said. The city uses it year-round for waste collection and street cleaning operations. The recently released version 2.0 features better GPS tracking of snow removal fleet vehicles than its predecessor, Google Maps integration, real-time salting data, information about the status of protected bike lanes and a cloud-based system that handles more concurrent users with faster response times, the city said in a Dec. 14 press release.
DSNY also is at its highest head count in two decades, the city said, and it has invested nearly $500 million in new sanitation trucks in the past two years, for a total of about 5,000 vehicles across all five boroughs. The city previously categorized streets in three tiers to prioritize snow clearing, but the investments and software have allowed it to eliminate that system, which had resulted in “different communities receiving different levels of service,” the city said in the press release. Now, every route and bike lane will be cleared when snow conditions warrant it, it said.
New York City got its first meaningful snow in more than two years in January, and a second storm dropped about 3 inches of snow on Central Park Tuesday, but Belinda Mager, DSNY director of communications, said snowfall has still been limited compared with seasons past.
“The system did give us more real-time information and situational awareness, allowing us to more effectively manage the storms we have experienced,” she said.
Startup gives Toronto snow plows traffic priority
Traffic optimization startup LYT, which uses cloud-based software to help manage the flow of vehicles in cities, recently expanded its services to snow plows in Toronto.
It seemed like a “no-brainer” that LYT’s platform, which works with existing technology on the roads, like traffic lights and cameras, could be applied to snow removal routes to make them more efficient and environmentally friendly, said founder and CEO Tim Menard.
LYT’s platform already was using machine learning and artificial intelligence, along with real-time traffic data from smart sensors, to move emergency vehicles through traffic quickly. It’s now applying the same technology to Toronto’s snow plows: Sensors in the plows allow the city’s operations department to adjust the flow of green lights so that plows move more quickly through intersections and neighborhoods.
Prioritizing snow plows in the flow of traffic offers financial and environmental benefits to cities, Menard said. Less stopping at intersections reduces wear and tear on snow removal vehicles, and it helps the plows clear main roads faster. In addition, snow removal vehicles are often also spreading salt on roads as they travel, so more continuous movement allows for more equal distribution of salt. Salt build-up is a large contributor to potholes, Menard said.
Less stopping also means vehicles use less fuel and produce fewer emissions. Two of the cities LYT works with report they have saved a combined $600,000 in fuel last year and reduced carbon dioxide emissions levels by 1,000 metric tons, the CEO said.
The value of transparency
Three years into the Snow Operations Map project, Syracuse officials said its use by residents continues to grow, showing that the demand for information transparency remains strong.
The city prioritizes clearing snow from the main roads and roads that provide access to hospitals, but the real-time information shows residents that it aims to be equitable in its snow removal, not favoring certain neighborhoods or areas over others, Dunham said.
“These decisions are being made by data, which will, hopefully … either restore or maintain the trust that residents have in local government,” Dunham said. “These decisions are being made with the limited resources that we have, and [the service is] going to the greatest areas of need.”
