With the winter season arriving, the city of Cincinnati, will be looking to GPS technology to help in the snow removal efforts. The city’s Department of Public Services currently is in the process of deploying a Navtrak-developed telematics solution in its 100-truck snow plow fleet, a deployment that has been a long time coming.
“We have been watching GPS technology for about the past 10 or 15 years,” Diane Watkins, assistant superintendent for the city’s Department of Public Services, told Satellite News. “Early on, it was pretty primitive and fairly expensive. In the past couple of years, we have seen the price become effective for a government agency.”
For the agency, which is spending $170,000 on the deployment, it was more than just cost that led to the decision to finally deploy the Navtrak solution. “At one time you could only track once every five minutes where a truck had been,” Watkins said. “We wanted to be able to track every 30 seconds — where the truck is and what the truck is actually doing, because it doesn’t do us any good in snow operations if [all we know is] the truck is just driving.” The system reports not only the location of the trucks, but other vital information, including whether the plow is up or down, the calcium chloride tank is on and whether the salt spreader is in use.
The department oversees snow treatment and removal for about 3,000 lane miles, and each middle manager in the department is responsible for making sure an area of about 550 lane miles are treated properly following a snowfall.
Prior to the deployment of the GPS solution, “our middle managers would be out making sure folks were using the equipment properly and distributing the correct amount of salt,” Watkins said. “We have had a lot of middle management reductions in recent years, so we don’t have a lot of managers that are out in the field being able to track where folks are.”
With the GPS solution installed, coordination of the trucks will be an easier task, Watkins said. “We will be able to watch as the streets get treated and see if we are having a problem area where maybe the trucks aren’t able to move fast enough. We can watch and make moves from a central location if we need to redistribute our equipment.”
The system also adds a component of accountability. “A lot of times citizens think that once salt hits the street, it automatically melts the snow,” Watkins said. “If they can’t see their street pavement, they don’t we actually provided any treatment. This actually gives us some documentation to show citizens that, ‘Yes, we were on your street and this is the time we were on your street.'”
–Gregory Twachtman
(Diane Watkins, Cincinnati Deptartment of Public Services, diane.watkins@cincinnati- oh.gov)
