Residents of Syracuse, New York — the snowiest city in America — once bombarded the service’s hotline with complaints of street neglect during… snow storms, Even if the plows had passed two hours earlier but the work was hidden by fresh snow.
It now appears that public confidence is on the rise as Syracuse and other cities across the United States incorporate upgrades such as video surveillance, GPS mapping, and… artificial intelligence In snow operations that were almost entirely dependent on manual planning.
Syracuse was one of the first cities to revamp the way snowplows are deployed, and complaint calls dropped 30% under the new system, said Connor Muldoon, the city’s chief innovation officer.
“People will look out their window and say, ‘You guys are doing a terrible job,'” Muldoon said. “And we can point to a general map and say, ‘These are all the breadcrumbs from when that plow was there.'”
Each winter, Syracuse averages 126 inches (3.2 m) of snowfall, more than any other American city with a population of at least 100,000 people. Even before the snow storm hit Northeast of the country Last week, the city already exceeded its typical average due to a record accumulation of 2 feet (60 cm) in a single day in late December.
With the goal of clearing every street within 24 hours after a storm, Syracuse partnered in 2021 with San Francisco-based Samsara to put live GPS tracking and dash cams on the city’s fleet vehicles including Snow plows. The system, integrated with GIS mapping software, allows officials to monitor live video and plow locations in real time.
While residents cannot access the live stream, they can view a public map that is updated every 5 minutes to show which roads have been cleared.
Samsara began incorporating AI into its products in 2019. This winter, for the first time, it provided customers with footage from other cameras within its large network, helping officials better understand conditions on the street even when a worker wasn’t there.
Kiren Sekar, the company’s chief product officer, cited an example of needing to dispatch the closest plow to a snow emergency in Plainwell, Michigan.
“Instead of having to sift through a vehicle list, he can actually see, ‘We have Trevor in car 203, 15 minutes away,'” Sekar said.
Samsara partners with communities of different sizes to upgrade their snow removal systems, but the country’s largest city — New York City – She developed herself.
Its tracking software, known as BladeRunner, monitors snow removal equipment (including garbage trucks with plows attached) while a human in the command center — not artificial intelligence — analyzes the GPS data. The city is exploring artificial intelligence in the future to handle the thousands of calls and online service requests that could be received in a single day.
Another way the big city’s approach differs from its upstate neighbor Syracuse is that each block gets the same treatment, with each plow assigned a specific route during a storm. Typically, 99% of the city’s roads would be plowed within the first four hours after a moderate snowfall under ideal conditions, but it didn’t quite reach that mark during last week’s historic storm, said Joshua Goodman, deputy commissioner of the city’s Department of Sanitation.
Goodman said all streets in New York City get the same treatment, regardless of whether they are main or side streets.
“So what it does is allow for equality,” he said.
With US cities and states spending up to $4 billion annually snow operations, The new technology also helps ensure that roads are not subject to flooding or excessive salinity, which can cause environmental damage.
Fayetteville, Arkansas, has launched a public-facing snow removal map for the first time this winter. It reported improvements in plowing time, labor costs and fuel savings, despite enduring about twice as much snow as last year.
“This is the first year some of the roads have been treated or plowed at all, and that goes back to being able to see where we need to go and if we’re there,” said Russ Jackson Jr., the city’s director of fleet operations.
The town of Edison, New Jersey, cut its spending on salt and brine by 35% and its insurance payments by 60%, thanks to a video that helped prove that plow drivers were usually not at fault when vehicles collided with another driver’s car.
Video installed on snowplows in Iowa helped prove that all but one of the 12 snowplow accidents in one day were the fault of the other driver, said Craig Bargfried, the state’s director of winter operations.
“How can you not see that big orange truck with flashing lights in front of you?” He said. “Boo, they’re heading straight for us.”
Kalamazoo County was the first county in Michigan to use a turn-by-turn navigation system to dispatch snowplows during a storm. Rusty McLean, assistant superintendent of its road commission, called it a significant improvement in efficiency.
“The old way of doing it, which was this overview of where everyone had to go to plow, was just in a big book of paper maps,” McLean said. “You have to stop, find the page you’re looking for, call someone on the phone and ask if they’ve plowed that area.”