'Wow!' Now you can track your plow
COLCHESTER - Snow was starting to fall when Rodney Kelley set out from St. Albans one recent evening to drive the 23 miles back home to Jeffersonville.
Arriving in Fairfax, he started to worry about the stretch of highway ahead, Vermont 104, which he knew could get too slippery for his liking if the pavement remained unplowed. So he pulled off the road, fished out his smartphone and navigated to a map. Just ahead of him on 104, according to the map display, a state snowplow was clearing a path.
"I pulled over and signed on to it and said, 'I think we're OK to go,'" Kelley said. Relieved, he resumed his journey.
Kelley, a 49-year-old kitchen worker at a Jeffersonville restaurant, owed his peace of mind to a nearly half-million-dollar investment and a bit of technological ingenuity from the Vermont Agency of Transportation.
This winter, VTrans unveiled Plow Finder, an online map that shows the location and a 90-minute trail for 250 state snowplows — almost the entire fleet. The free service is the latest iteration of a fleet-management system the agency installed two years ago so managers could see the location of the plows, along with a host of data: weight of salt in the truck bed, distribution rate of brine, vehicle speed, whether the plow blade is up or down, and much more.
RELATED: What's closed in Chittenden County
Winter Storm Stella is here: What you need to know
Once the internal application was up and running, VTrans leaders, inspired by similar endeavors in other states, had an idea: Take the basic information from the fleet-management program — namely the plow location and history — and make it available to everybody.
"Finding ways to turn the vast amounts of data we have at our disposal into information that is useful to the traveling public is an ongoing project at VTrans," Chief Engineer Kevin Marshia said when Plow Finder was unveiled in January.
The transportation agency contracted with Toronto-based Webtech Wireless to provide the hardware and to supply the ongoing data feed.
Each snowplow is equipped with a hardware package that cost $1,200 — a total expenditure of $300,000 spread over several years, according to figures VTrans provided to the Burlington Free Press.
The hardware includes a black tracking device that resembles a hockey puck affixed to the top of a snowplow's orange cab, along with a digital display for the driver and a transmitter to send the information.
The technology relies on GPS to acquire a plow's location, and cell towers to upload data back to the VTrans computer systems.
The cell connection and Webtech software costs $32 per month per vehicle — $8,000 total for all plows. That comes to $96,000 a year to supply the information for the internal fleet-management program.
Plow Finder itself was built in-house by VTrans technology workers, who harnessed the data coming in to the internal software and created the simplified version available to the public.
The program works with a mapping software known as ArcGIS, a standard government mapping service that the Transportation Agency has been using for years in other applications, agency spokesman Erik Filkorn said.
Once VTrans had created the bare bones for Plow Finder, the agency paid $1,500 to Webtech for set-up costs and has an ongoing monthly bill of $100 for the data feed, Filkorn said.
On the map, plows appear as orange icons that sort of look like snowplows — and also a bit like orange squiggles. VTrans has affectionately started referring to plows on the map as Cheetos, after the snack food.
RELATED:
Stop warming up your engine in the winter
Snow arrives (finally) in Vermont; winter-lovers happy
"I've been plowing for 10 years, and I've never seen nothing like this," Shawn Lafountain, a Transportation Agency maintenance supervisor at the District 5 facility at Fort Ethan Allen in Colchester, said one recent snowy day.
He's especially fond of the internal mapping service and all the information he can summon for each plow as it works the roads. With a few clicks on his computer, Lafountain called up the plow driven by Andre Fontaine, who had been on duty since before 6 a.m. The map showed each stretch of road Fontaine had covered on his shift and what his plow was doing at all times.
The public map, meanwhile, offered the location of Fontaine's vehicle and, in a line of blue dots that stretched behind the plow like digital breadcrumbs, a history of where he had been. Clicking a blue dot indicated what time the plow when through and provided some aggregated data from other sources, such as a general description of the road conditions and a computer-modeled weather forecast.
Fontaine said he has no concerns people can see where he is and what he's doing.
"Management can see us for a couple years now. Now, the public can. It's no big deal," he said, adding that some buddies even know his plow's ID number, which is displayed on the map. "I have a couple of my friends that will watch me."
VTrans has heard from people across the state about how they're using Plow Finder, Filkorn said. Workers at a northern Vermont ski resort, for instance, will watch for a plow to clear a winding mountain road before they make their trek to the hill. At a state welcome center along the interstate, staff keep an eye on the Cheetos on the map so they can advise travelers when the best time will be to leave.
Filkorn himself uses the map to plot his route to the office on snowy days.
Kelley, the Jeffersonville resident and Plow Finder fan, said he'd like to see a few more features, such as a live video feed from the snowplows and real-time weather and road conditions.
The latter is in the works, Filkorn said, though adding more sensors to the trucks remains a few years away. VTrans hopes to be able to provide at least air and pavement temperature.
"We're going to have 250 mobile weather stations rolling around the state," he said.
Kelley can't wait. He already shows off Plow Finder to customers at the restaurant and sums up their response in one word: "Wow!"
10.6 inches of snow in Burlington, so far
Contact Adam Silverman at 802-660-1854 or asilverman@freepressmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @wej12.