Kansas City has 300 vehicles at its disposal to clear the city’s streets of snow. — City of Kansas City
Many US cities are now turning to online platforms specialising in geolocation and real-time data analysis to improve their public services. This is the case, for example, with Kansas City’s winter snow removal operations.
Kansas City, Missouri, is using a solution proposed by Rubicon, which provides snowplow drivers with turn-by-turn navigation, taking into account their location and work already carried out by other snow removal vehicles.
In fact, RUBICONSmartCity platform records the progress of snow clearing along the various routes and locates the 300 or so vehicles that make up the municipal fleet in charge of snow clearance.
Drivers can access all this information via a tablet application. In particular, it indicates the order of the routes to be cleared, and can reconfigure routes in the event of a vehicle breakdown. Indeed, the tool makes it possible to adjust each driver's route in real time to optimise current operations.
The aim is to optimise snow clearing on the city's main roads, and at the same time to ensure the safety of residents in bad weather conditions. An online map even enables residents to track the progress of snow clearing operations.
Kansas City has more than 300 snow removal vehicles at its disposal to clear more than 10,000 km of roadways on some 100 routes. In all, more than 400 employees have been trained for this type of mission, ready to work shifts around the clock, should the need arise.
Today, RUBICONSmartCity is deployed in some 100 cities across the United States, for snow removal and other operations such as refuse collection. Examples include Atlanta, Denver and Miami. This technology helps these cities to manage their fleets of heavy vehicles more effectively, for ever more efficient public services.
With regard to road snow removal, researchers at Drexel University in the US city of Philadelphia are currently working on a new form of self-heating concrete capable of automatically melting snow and ice when temperatures are particularly low. The idea is to one day be able to build roads with this concrete and reduce the need for salting and snow removal.
To date, the relatively few experiments with self-heating road sections have involved installing electric heating cables beneath the road surface, a system that is certainly effective, but very complicated and expensive to implement on a large scale. – AFP Relaxnews
