Akron Mayor Shammas Malik unveiled the city's new snowplow tracker Wednesday. The tool provides near real time information on the city's snow removal operations, according to officials.
The goal of the tracker is to better communicate snow removal services with residents, Information Technology Director Darren Rozenek said.
"This is another opportunity for us to be much more transparent in our operations and give the citizens the knowledge of exactly when they will provide service from the city of Akron," he said.
The tracker explains where plows are currently and at what level they are operating. The city outlined four levels of response. Level one includes crews salting before a snow or ice event. Level two is response for very minor snow and ice events. Level three is for small or minor snow events. Level four indicates all available trucks and crews are responding.
Residents can view the status of roads, request service and report issues through the snow response dashboard.
"It will be near real-time," Rozenek said. "As actions are taking place, this site will be updated for the citizen to understand exactly what is happening."
This technology can be used in the future to provide transparency on other city services, Malik said.
"I think the next thing up is sanitation and really helping track that better — trash and recycling," he said.
Two interactive maps show the last time roads were serviced, from within the last hour to more than 24 hours ago and the priority order of every street in the city. First-priority streets include expressways, arterial streets, heavily traveled collector streets, Akron Metropolitan Regional Transit Authority bus routes, hospitals, schools and severe hills. Second-priority streets include heavily traveled residential streets and hills. Third-priority streets include all other public streets.
The city's Snow and Ice Control Plan states that first-priority streets will be serviced until bare pavement condition exists. The same goes for second-priority streets, but passable conditions are standard for third-priority streets when bare pavement conditions cannot be reached.
All third-priority streets may not be serviced in every snow and ice event and may only be serviced if requested.
