GPS monitoring of plows helped the town reply to snow, however left residents out of the loop

Before the big snow storm on November 17, Buffalo officials talked about how their new GPS tracking for 44-city snowplows would keep residents updated on snow clearing operations.

The city of Buffalo and its surrounding towns continue to dig themselves out of the record-breaking snowstorm that began dumping in the area on Thursday…

On Tuesday, they explained where it went wrong.

“While a lot has gone well, we still have work to do before the next storm hits,” Mayor Byron Brown said. “One of the biggest disappointments during this storm was the new GPS technology and its public facing component. The new system helped the plow drivers, but it didn’t do much for our residents.”

The GPS tracking aided internal snow removal operations and the emergency response, but it didn’t properly communicate the same data publicly, Brown said.

“All the information was there, but it wasn’t presented properly,” the mayor said.

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The city launched GPS tracking so residents could view an interactive map and pinpoint snow removal status along the 800-mile road.

The storm that buried the Southtowns in heavy, deep snow last week has turned ordinary incidents into matters of life and death. And through them, first responders, community workers, volunteers and kind neighbors rallied to make it happen.

City officials are working with the provider to fix disruptions, and they hope to have the issues fixed before the next blizzard.

Most of the problems related to functionality and mapping.

Brown, along with City Public Works Commissioner Nathan Marton and Parking Enforcement Division Commissioner Raymond Wagner, held a news conference on Tuesday to update on the city’s response to last week’s early winter snowstorm that hit the region hit with record amounts of snowfall.

One of the flaws in the system was mapping complications, Marton said.

The map the city used to create what the public was seeing didn’t have the accurate metrics, “which caused some reporting problems,” he said.

Also, some of the GPS devices turned off and on “sporadically”.

“So we don’t know exactly what that is, and there’s a quick turn off and on again, so it’s random (and) it’s not always the same unit or time,” Marton said.

And some of the units “were not operational,” he added.

“So we identified these three problems,” Marton said. “We’re working with the GPS provider to fix the problems by the next storm,” at no additional cost to the city.

Additionally, devices from New York State and Erie County that were used to support Buffalo’s snow response aren’t part of GPS tracking, so they haven’t come forward, said Marton, who hopes to change that.

“We think that’s a gap that we can hopefully look at. We’re working to see if there’s a way to temporarily put these units — this equipment — on these vehicles as well, to give the public a better overall picture of what’s happening on the roads,” he said.

The mayor stressed that the system’s failures did not affect or affect the city’s snow control response.

“The GPS system should provide transparency for the public,” Brown said. “It has absolutely nothing to do with our reaction to snow. So whether that existed or not, that wouldn’t improve the response.”

Improperly parked cars were a big challenge during last winter’s snowfalls, but not so much this time, Brown said.

There were 175 mini-tugs to available legal parking spaces within 500 feet.

“Our residents have paid attention,” he said. “Most residents followed the guidance we issued. All of this helped enormously with plowing and snow clearing.”

City crews hauled nearly 8 million pounds of snow, almost enough to fill Buffalo City Hall three times, officials said.

The snow ended up in various landfills, including the Seneca Street Engineer’s Garage, Fillmore and Buell Avenues, the Houghton Park parking lot, and Fuhrmann Boulevard.

Overall, Brown rated snow removal efforts as improved.

“If you look at how our workforce has performed compared to previous states of emergency, we’ve done better,” Brown said. “But we clearly have to do more because our climate is changing. There is no doubt about that and these historic storms are becoming the norm.”

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