New York City is geotagging crosswalks to speed up snow removal

As snow piled up in front of bus stops and fire hydrants during New York City’s second winter storm of the year, city workers have tried to move fast to remove it before snow hardened into ice. A new internal tool makes that job easier to track.

The city’s Department of Sanitation (DSNY) now tags infrastructure that’s been plowed in a mobile mapping tool that employees can update on the go.

“We have started the work of geotagging every single bus shelter and crosswalk,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Monday, and overnight, he said the city cleared more than 1,600 crosswalks, 419 fire hydrants, and nearly 900 bus stops.

DSNY handles trash collection, but it’s also tasked with snow removal from city streets and bike lanes, areas within its legal obligation. DSNY sometimes provides supplemental services too, plowing pedestrian infrastructure like curb ramps, unsheltered bus stops, and fire hydrants that property owners are responsible for.

In the past, this supplemental work was done piecemeal, but under Mamdani, the amount of supplemental service has “vastly increased,” says Joshua Goodman, a DSNY deputy commissioner. “That necessitated a need to formally track this work,” he says.

Cities from Bellevue, Washington, to Syracuse, New York, use digital maps to show residents when streets get plowed, and New Yorkers can track when their streets were last plowed on PlowNYC, a public site launched in 2013. DSNY needed its own PlowNYC, but for bus stops and more.

“We developed an internal mapping tool, and Sanitation Supervisors make live updates from the field when one of these locations in their assigned section is complete,” Goodman tells Fast Company. “So maybe it’s a bit simpler than the terminology implies—it’s essentially someone making updates to a central database on their work cell phone—but it’s a big development for us, especially so quickly.”

“This is our first storm using it, but it is allowing greater efficiency around clearing these important areas,” he adds.

Preparations began following the snowstorm in January, when sites were surveyed for the mapping tool. The interface looks like a typical maps app, and while perhaps simpler than what the idea of “geotagging” might conjure, the database of information the tool stores is vast. New York City has about 13,000 bus stops and about 83,000 crosswalks in commercial corridors. The tool was designed by the DSNY operations management division, which is its data and analytics team.

To handle snow from the latest storm, DSNY has delayed trash and recycling collection so its workers can prioritize snow removal, and it’s hired hundreds of emergency temporary snow shovelers for $30 per hour. That’s a pop-up snow shoveling army with tens of thousands of sites and miles of ground to cover. Tracking this work with clipboards wouldn’t be efficient. By developing an internal tool to better monitor their job, DSNY found a quick solution to solve a pressing problem.