Navigation Guided Plowing Project

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2012

At the conclusion of each winter season the Montgomery County Department of Transportation (MCDOT) debriefs and examines its Winter Road Operations Program (i.e. snow and ice control) to examine the effectiveness of its means and methods, review new technologies, streamline processes, and improve safety and efficiencies while optimizing the cost of effective snow and ice control. In all, MCDOT is responsible to plow and treat over 5,000 lane miles of road consisting of more than 20,000 street segments. Over the past several years the Automated Vehicle Locator (AVL) system has been touted as “front-and-center” as the latest technology to assist large metropolitan agencies to track and manage its snow removal fleet during winter storm events. In its examination of the AVL system, MCDOT was not convinced that simply tracking its fleet and validating information such as idle time, power take off (PTO) utilization, salt application rates, missed streets, etc., met its “return on investment” expectations of investing nearly $1M to equip its fleet as well as its ancillary contract support for the 3 ½ month winter season with AVL hardware and associated software. Moreover, MCDOT wasn’t convinced that the AVL endeavor was the best solution to its unique challenge of of clearing more than 5,000 lane miles of primary and residential streets serving a population of roughly one-million residents. Instead of knowing “where we have been” MCDOT decided to focus on the concept of “know where we are going” by embarking on a project to program TomTom Navigation devices to navigate the county and contract snow plows through more than 220 discrete neighborhood plow routes that were mapped in its GIS system. The application of programming commonly used consumer grade navigation devices has proven to be a reliable cost effective tool to navigate the county’s snow plow equipment thereby providing county residents with more accurate, efficient, and consistent levels of service. MCDOT’s 220 plow routes were gleaned from its GIS system and programmed on SD cards consuming less than 1.5 MB of disk space stored on a secure digital (SD) removable hard drive (“SD Card”) and distributed to county and contract plow drivers to load into TomTom navigation devices. The SD card containing the county’s neighborhood plow routes in conjunction with TomTom Navigation units provide audible and visual guidance to the driver to any of the 220 routes with turn-by-turn navigation through the route to its completion irrespective of driver’s knowledge or experience of the route(s).