Residents of Syracuse, New York — America’s snowiest city — once barraged a service hotline with street neglect complaints during blizzards, even if plows had passed two hours earlier but the work was hidden by fresh snow.
Now public trust seems to be rising as Syracuse and other cities across the U.S. integrate up
grades such as video monitoring, 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 snowplows, and complaint calls have dropped by 30% under the new system, said Conor Muldoon, the city’s chief innovation officer.
“People will look out their window and say, ‘Hey, you guys are doing a terrible job,'” Muldoon said. “And we can point to a public map and say, ‘Here’s all the breadcrumbs for when that plow was there.'”
Snowier Than Usual in US Snow Capital
Each winter, Syracuse averages 126 inches (3.2 meters) of snow, more than any other U.S. city o
f at least 100,000 people. Even before the blizzard that pounded the Northeast last week, the city had already surpassed its typical average due to a record 2-foot (60-centimeter) accumulation on one day in late December.
With a 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 dashca
ms on city fleet vehicles including snowplows. Integrated with GIS mapping software, the system allows officials to monitor live video and plow locations in real time.
While residents can’t access live feeds, they can view a public map that updates every 5 minutes to show which roads have been cleared.
Samsara started incorporating AI into its products in 2019. This winter, for the first time, it has p
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rovided customers with footage from other cameras within its large network, helping officials better understand conditions on a street even when no worker is there.
Kiren Sekar, the company’s chief product officer, cited an example of needing to dispatch the closest plow for a snow emergency in Plainwell, Michigan.
“Rather than having to sift through a list of vehicles, it can actually figure this out: ‘We’ve got Trevor in vehicle 203, 15 minutes away,'” Sekar said.
New York City’s Approach
Samsara partners with communities of various sizes to upgrade their snowplow systems, but the nation’s largest city — New York City — developed its own.
Its tracking program known as BladeRunner monitors snow removal equipment (including garbage trucks with plows attached) while a human in a command center
— not AI — analyzes the GPS data. The city is exploring AI in the future to process the thousands of 311 calls and online service requests it can get in a single day.
The other way the big city’s approach differs from its upstate neighbor of Syracuse is that each plow runs a specific route during storms, ensuring main and side streets get essentially the same treatment.
“So what it does is allow equity,” said Joshua Goodman, deputy commissioner at the city’s Department of Sanitation.
Typically 99% of the city’s roads will be plowed within the first four hours after a moderate snowfall under ideal conditions, but Goodman said it didn’t quite mee
t that mark during last week’s historic storm.
