PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — If and when Philadelphia gets another big snow storm, residents and businesses will be able to monitor where snowplows are in the city as a new app has been in the planning stages for a while.
City Streets Commissioner Carlton Williams said in the last couple years, all the trucks used for plowing have been equipped with GPS, so their movements can be tracked. The app, PlowPHL, was tested out in the last storm.
“We believe in the next storm, in the immediate future, we will be able to launch it in the public phase,” he said.
The app shows a map of the city and a color-coded system shows where the trucks have been.
”If it's a solid dark blue line, it means that your street has been treated in the last six hours. If it has no line that means it hasn’t been treated at all, we haven't been there within 24 hours,” he explained.
Williams said PlowPHL is part of StreetSmartPHL, which shows where streets are being paved, where permits have allowed streets to be closed for construction or special events, and where trash and recycling have been picked up.
”PlowPHL allows residents to actually see which streets are being plowed in real time, so we can see when the last time a plow actually visited someone’s block or if a street was even plowed at all,” he added.
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It also allows the city to redirect trucks to areas where they might be needed most, a far cry from the old system where spotters would have to go out and report that information to the city.
The GPS system is faster and more efficient, he said.
“This system is one of the many ways we are trying to be more transparent and accountable to our public. We want the public to understand the importance of us being able to communicate information on how we’re doing on key services like trash pickup, plowing and paving.”
Williams said there were some minor challenges with the system during the last storm. For instance, some trucks were not reporting, which meant that information was either uploaded incorrectly, or a truck was on a different route.
There were also some glitches with getting a signal into certain places. But the city is working with Verizon Wireless to remedy that situation, he said.