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A Successful Deployment of the City of Syracuse's Snow Plow Map: What it Does, What We've Learned, and What We Plan to Do

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A Successful Deployment of the City of Syracuse's Snow Plow Map: What it Does, What We've Learned, and What We Plan to Do

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.

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Syracuse Winter Weather Operations

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In 2018, the Office of Accountability, Performance, and Innovation developed an in-house web application to track the City’s fleet of snow plow trucks and map street segments that had been plowed during winter storms in order to communicate to residents when their street had been plowed. The tool was exceptionally well-received and played an important role in the City’s communication strategy around an important public service delivery. However, last year the system experienced significant challenges with the underlying sensor technology and ran into limitations in the frequency of the network provider’s communications - resulting in performance issues that made the much-anticipated snow plow map no longer functional.

Despite extensive attempts to work around the inherent technical limitations, it became apparent that it was time to develop a more robust solution.

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Meet our new Deputy Chief Innovation & Data Officer

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Meet our new Deputy Chief Innovation & Data Officer

Introducing Conor Muldoon who will help to lead the API team in data and innovation to find new and efficient ways to improve how the City of Syracuse delivers services. Conor will oversee the implementation of a city-wide performance strategy and the continuous expansion of the city’s data infrastructure. He will assist our Chief Innovation & Data Officer in championing the Mayor’s innovative and performance management vision for all city departments and constituents.

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Introducing SYRCityline- transforming resident engagement and quality of service.

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Cityline has always been a portal to communicate with the residents, understand their concerns and find ways to address them, but a strong program is only successful if it continues to meet the needs for which it was intended, and for that, it has to be relevant, easy to use, and efficient.

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Managing Our Public Space With Permits

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So much of city life in Syracuse and in other cities operates in what is known as the “right-of-way,” which is space that is maintained and regulated for public use. Regulating the public right-of-way helps to make sure infrastructure is safe and usable.

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Meet our new Performance Management & Innovation Specialist

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As our Performance Management Fellow Mojdeh will work with City Departments to establish metrics that will be used to measure their operational performance, interview Department employees to understand their processes and data capture methods, and communicate performance insights through data visualizations and dashboards and will manage a city-wide, cross-departmental performance management program.