Residents of Syracuse, New York — America’s snowiest city — once barraged a service hotline with street neglect complaints during blizzards, even if plows had passed two hours earlier but the work was hidden by fresh snow.
Now public trust seems to be rising as Syracuse and other cities across the U.S. integrate upgrades such as video monitoring, GPS mapping and artificial intelligence into snow operations that once relied almost entirely on manual planning.
Syracuse was one of the first to revamp the way it deploys its snowplows, and complaint calls have dropped by 30% under the new system, said Conor Muldoon, the city’s chief innovation officer.
“People will look out their window and say, ‘Hey, you guys are doing a terrible job,’” Muldoon said. “And we can point to a public map and say, ‘Here’s all the breadcrumbs for when that plow was there.’”
Snowier than usual in the US snow capital
