Residents of Syracuse, New York – America’s snowiest city – once shut down a service hotline during a blizzard with complaints of neglected streets, even if plowing had been done two hours earlier but the work was hidden by fresh snow.
Now, public confidence seems to be on the rise as Syracuse and other cities across the U.S. have incorporated upgrades such as video monitoring, GPS mapping and artificial intelligence into snow operations that once relied entirely on manual planning.
Syracuse was one of the first to improve the way it deploys its snowplows, and complaint calls have dropped 30 percent under the new system, said Conor Muldoon, the city’s chief innovation officer.
“People will look out their window and say, ‘Hey, you guys are doing a terrible job,'” Muldoon said. “And we can point to a public map and say, ‘Here are all the breadcrumbs for when that plow was there.'”
The snow capital of the US is getting more snow than usual.
Each winter, Syracuse receives an average of 126 inches (3.2 m) of snow, more than any other U.S. city of at least 100,000 people. Even before last week’s blizzard hit the Northeast, the city had already surpassed its normal average with a record 2-foot (60-centimeter) accumulation in one day in late December.
With a goal of clearing every street within 24 hours after a storm, Syracuse partnered with San Francisco-based Samsara in 2021 to add live GPS tracking and dash cams to the city’s fleet of vehicles. Integrated with GIS mapping software, the system allows officials to monitor live video and plow locations in real time.
While residents cannot access live feeds, they can view a public map that updates every 5 minutes to show which roads have been cleared.
Samsara started incorporating AI into its products in 2019. This winter, for the first time, it provided users with footage from other cameras within its larger network, helping authorities better understand conditions on the road even when no workers are there.
Karen Secker, the company’s chief product officer, gave an example of needing to send the nearest plow to a snow emergency in Plainville, Michigan.
“Instead of sifting through a list of vehicles, it can actually infer: ‘We have Trevor in vehicle 203, 15 minutes away,'” Secker said.
View of New York City
Samsara partners with communities of various sizes to upgrade its snowplow systems, but the nation’s largest city — New York City — built its own.
Its tracking program known as Blade Runner monitors snow removal equipment (including garbage trucks with plows) while a human — not AI — in the command center analyzes the GPS data. The city is looking to AI in the future to process the thousands of 311 calls and online service requests it may receive in a single day.
Another way the city’s approach differs from that of its upstate neighbor Syracuse is that each plow runs a specific route during storms, ensuring that the main and side streets receive essentially the same treatment.
“So what it does is allow for equity,” said Joshua Goodman, deputy commissioner of the city’s Department of Sanitation.
Normally 99% of city streets would be plowed within the first four hours after a moderate snowfall under ideal conditions, but Goodman said that mark was not met during last week’s historic storm.
Reduction in costs and insurance claims
With US cities and states spending more than $4 billion a year on snow operations, the new technology also helps ensure roads aren’t too slick or too salty, which can cause environmental damage.
Fayetteville, Arkansas, launched its snow removal map to the public for the first time this winter. He reported improvements in plowing time, labor costs and fuel economy, despite having to endure nearly twice as much snow as the year before.
“This is the first year that some of the roads have ever been treated or plowed, and it makes it possible to see where we need to go and if we’ve been there,” said Ross Jackson Jr., the city’s fleet operations manager.
The town of Edison, New Jersey, cut its costs on salt and brine by 35% and its insurance payouts by 60%, thanks to video that helped prove that plows were usually not at fault when vehicles collided with another motorist’s car.
Craig Bergfried, the state’s winter operations administrator, said video installed on ice bridges in Iowa helped show that all but one of the 12 ice bridge crashes in a single day were driver at fault.
“How can you not see this big orange truck with flashing lights ahead of you?” he said. “Boom, they just walk into us.”
Kalamazoo County was the first county in Michigan to use turn-by-turn navigation to dispatch ice bridges during storms. Rusty McClain, assistant general superintendent of its road commission, called it a huge improvement in performance.
“The old-school way of doing it, the bird’s-eye view where everybody needed to plow, was just in a big book with paper maps,” McClain said. “You have to pull over, find the page you’re looking for, call someone on the phone and ask if they’ve plowed that area.”
Photo: A plow begins removing snow from a residential street during the start of a severe winter storm Sunday, Feb. 22, 2026, in Fort Lee, N.J. (AP Photo/Pablo Salinas)
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