Before setting out on icy roads this winter, Howard residents can log on to the Internet for a quick check of which roads have been cleared and if a snowplow is headed to their neighborhood.
“They can watch them marching down the main road, hitting all the cul-de-sacs,” said Bill Malone, highways chief in Howard?s Department of Public Works.
Most of the county?s 123 snow trucks are equipped with a global positioning system, trackers and a wireless modem. The county?s Web site updates every 15 minutes with plow locations, treated and untreated roads.
The program started a couple years ago, and Howard is the only county in the area to give residents the capability to track the trucks in near-real time.
Public works officials use the system to see if a truck has broken down or manage routes for more efficient plowing, Malone said.
“It?s an internal management thing, and the Internet version is value added,” he said
In Baltimore County, public works officials use GPS technology to track and dispatch snowplows, but adding the online capability would have been too expensive, said Rob Stradling, director of the Office of Information Technology.
“The right thing for the taxpayers was a similar, scaled-down version without the [online] interface,” he said, adding the online part can cost $1 million or more.
Instead, the county spent less than $200,000 for the GPS equipment and connection charges for the first year, Stradling said.
Maintaining the program costs Howard about $60,000 a year, Malone said, plus the initial cost of the GPS systems, which is about $800 a truck.
Cost was the primary reason other jurisdictions don?t have such as system, officials said.
Harford has no plans for an online system, but there?s always the old-fashioned method.
“You look out your window, and you can see if the roads are cleared,” said spokesman Bob Thomas.
ON THE NET
