Newfangled City Tool Will Take the Guesswork Out of Winter Route Planning

You can file this one under “things that mesmerized the BikePGH office.” A few months ago we gleefully watched little bus icons creep across the screen on pitlivebus, a website that tracks Port Authority buses in realtime. Today it’s all about the plows.

You can now watch the Public Works snow plows in real time. The City of Pittsburgh has launched a new Snow Plow Tracker website that shows the movement of snow removal vehicles throughout the city.

120 of Pittsburgh’s Public Works vehicles used for snow and ice control have been equipped with GPS devices. The brand new website shows the current location of Public Works vehicles that have moved within the last four hours and the travel history of plows within the past few hours.

Pro tip: Zoom in on a street and click on a green line on the map to see when a plow or salt truck was last there. Yep — it’s that cool and that detailed. Check out other tips in the reference guide.

A work in progress, this first version of the website shows the location of the snow plows, but cannot differentiate between a vehicle that’s simply traveling and one that is removing snow. A later version of the website will show whether a truck’s plow and spreader are actively engaged. We’ll be sure to alert you when we hear about that new feature…so we can all geek out together.

Kudos to the City for providing residents with this important info in an innovative way.

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