High-tech snowplows and AI help cities clean up from big storms

Residents of Syracuse, New York – the snowiest city in America – once launched a hotline to receive complaints about negligence on the streets during blizzards, even though the plows had passed two hours earlier and the work was hidden by fresh snow.

Today, public confidence appears to be growing as Syracuse and other U.S. cities incorporate improvements such as video surveillance, GPS mapping and artificial intelligence into snow operations that once relied almost entirely on manual planning.

Syracuse was one of the first to revamp the way it deploys its snow plows, and complaint calls were down 30 percent thanks to the new system, said Conor Muldoon, the city’s chief innovation officer.

“People will look out the window and say, ‘Hey, you’re doing a terrible job,'” Muldoon said. “And we can show a public map and say, ‘Here’s all the breadcrumbs for when this plow was here.'”

Each winter, Syracuse receives an average of 10 feet of snow, more than any other U.S. city with at least 100,000 residents. Even before the blizzard that hit the Northeast last week, the city had already exceeded its usual average due to a record accumulation of 60 centimeters in a single day in late December.

With the goal of clearing every street within 24 hours of a storm, Syracuse partnered in 2021 with San Francisco-based Samsara to install live GPS tracking and dashcams on vehicles in the city’s fleet, including snow plows. Integrated with GIS mapping software, the system allows managers to monitor live video and clear snow from locations in real time.

Although residents cannot access live feeds, they can view a public map that updates every 5 minutes to show which roads have been cleared.

Samsara began integrating AI into its products in 2019. This winter, for the first time, it provided its customers with images from other cameras in its extensive network, helping authorities better understand conditions on a street, even when there are no workers present.

Kiren Sekar, the company’s product manager, cited an example of needing to dispatch the nearest snowplow in a snow emergency in Plainwell, Michigan.

“Rather than having to go through a list of vehicles, he can understand this: ‘We have Trevor in vehicle 203, 15 minutes away,'” Sekar said.

Samsara partners with communities of various sizes to upgrade their snowplow systems, but the nation’s largest city, New York, has developed its own.

Its tracking program, known as BladeRunner, monitors snow removal equipment (including garbage trucks equipped with plows) while a human in a command center – not an AI – analyzes the GPS data. The city is exploring AI in the future to handle the thousands of 311 calls and online service requests it can receive in a single day.

The other difference between the big city’s approach and that of Syracuse, its upstate neighbor, is that every block gets the same treatment, with each plow assigned a specific route in case of a storm. Typically, 99 percent of the city’s roads will be plowed within four hours of a moderate snowfall under ideal conditions, but that wasn’t quite achieved during last week’s historic storm, said Joshua Goodman, deputy commissioner of the city Department of Sanitation.

Goodman said all streets in New York City get the same treatment, whether they are main streets or side streets.

“So it allows for fairness,” he said.

While U.S. cities and states spend more than $4 billion on snow removal operations each year, new technology also helps ensure that roads are not over-plowed or over-salted, which can cause environmental damage.

Fayetteville, Arkansas, launched a public snow removal map for the first time this winter. The company reported improvements in snow removal times, labor costs and fuel savings, despite double the amount of snow it endured a year ago.

“This is the first year that some of the roads have been treated or plowed, and it comes down to being able to see where we need to go and if we’ve gotten there,” said Ross Jackson Jr., the city’s director of fleet operations.

The town of Edison, New Jersey, reduced its salt and brine costs by 35 percent and its insurance payouts by 60 percent, thanks to a video that helped prove that plow drivers were usually not at fault when their vehicles collided with another motorist’s car.

Video installed on snowplows in Iowa showed that all but one of the snowplow accidents in a single day were the fault of the other driver, said Craig Bargfrede, the state’s winter operations administrator.

“How can you not see this big orange truck with flashing lights in front of you? » he said. “Boom, they’re hitting us.”

Kalamazoo County was the first county in Michigan to use turn-by-turn navigation to dispatch snow plows during a storm. Rusty McClain, deputy general superintendent of the Highway Commission, called it a huge improvement in efficiency.

“The old-fashioned way, this overview of where everyone needs to go to plow, was just in a big book with paper maps,” McClain said. “You would have to stop, find the page you are looking for, call someone on the phone and ask them if they have plowed that area.”