Pittsburgh working out glitches in $1.4 million snow tracking system
A Minnesota company was in Pittsburgh on Tuesday trying to work out bugs in the city’s new $1.4 million system for treating streets in the winter.
Pittsburgh last year purchased technology and equipment from Minnesota-based Quetica LLC that permits officials to control and track snowplow operations, including routes, vehicles locations and the amount of salt flowing from trucks. Much of the same information is available for public viewing on Pittsburgh’s Snow Plow Tracker app.
Public Works Director Mike Gable said trucks were not properly distributing salt for a short period after stopping in traffic and some information was not being transmitted to Snow Plow Tracker.
“It’s technology. It’s equipment,” Gable said. “There’s going to be some glitches with it. It’s not a consistent problem with every vehicle. We found out some of the vehicles were not set properly. They were not reading ground speed properly. They were functioning fine. They just weren’t communicating with Snow Plow Tracker.”
Quetica representatives this week are working with city mechanics at DPW’s Heavy Equipment Division headquarters in the Strip District, tweaking settings and making other repairs to about 23 pickups that experienced problems, Gable said. The city has about 134 snow vehicles.
He said he wanted to get the repairs done before the next snowfall.
“Streets haven’t suffered as a result of it,” he said. “It’s just that we’re not seeing all the data on the Snow Plow Tracker we want to see and we’re not seeing all the reports that we’re able to run in terms of speed and coverage and how much salt was used and things like that.”
Pittsburgh in 2015 introduced the Snow Plow Tracker website and app, which permits residents to see when a truck is actually plowing and salting a street.
The upgraded system is designed to record whether a snowplow is up or down, calibrate the rotation of salt spreaders to make sure the proper amount is being utilized for the amount of snow and calculate when a truck needs to be refilled with salt, among other things.
Gable said the system for tracking whether snowplows are up or down is not functioning.
“That’s not something we’re working on physically right now because there were just too many little issues with that,” he said.
Gable said the system will operate correctly and save on salt purchases once all the bugs are worked out.
“We don’t have to go and put a thousand tons of salt for every inch of snow that we get,” he said. “We’re probably down to maybe 200 tons per inch. We can tell the operators that this is what we want you to put your settings at, and we have the opportunity to view that. That conserves a lot of salt. We don’t have a lot of waste.”
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