As residents flock to Summerside's snowplow tracker, province considers one of its own

With Summerside’s recent rollout of an online snowplow tracker, the city has learned that residents really want to know what's happening after a big storm.

Tanner Doiron, the city's acting director of communications and events, said there have been 413 clicks directly to the site over the past week — an 839 per cent increase.

“The engagement levels have obviously skyrocketed to that specific page on our website, which tells us it's likely because of the snow-clearing GPS," he said.

"So, yeah, our gut tells us that it's being used.”

Doiron said the tracker adds a level of transparency for the public, and is also a safety measure for plow drivers.

“It helps us track some data. We can look at optimizing our snow-clearing efforts as a whole," he said. "It's a piece of technology that really just assists everyone, whether it's ... keeping an eye on a neighbour or a loved one and our own staff.” 

Stephen Szwarc, director of highway maintenance for the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure, said the province is looking into a similar service for its fleet of plows.

He said about 70 per cent of the plows are equipped with a GPS system, and the department wants to wait until that number is higher before offering an interactive map to the public.

“It's not something that we can install all in one year,” he said. “Once we get in a situation that we feel that everything is operational ... then we'd look at the option of putting it out like a public cloud tracker.”

Szwarc said rolling out such a system too early could mean providing inaccurate information to the public. 

“But it's something we're going to be working over the summer,” he said. “If we were to turn that switch on, how do we ensure that we have all the ... reliable information to the public all the time.”

Summerside will continue monitoring engagement, Doiron said, and an app for the service could be an option in the future.

“It seems to be well-received and we're seeing nothing but positive results right now on our end," Doiron said. "I would suspect that the goal is to continue rolling this forward and keep it for winters to come.”

Summerside also held a contest that asked residents to name the city's snowplows and other municipal vehicles. Those names can be seen on the online tracker.