Rural Nova Scotia residents say province’s plow tracker tool gone downhill

Some rural residents who’ve used the province’s Plowtracker map for several years say a recent upgrade has resulted in a less useful tool.

On its Plowtracker website, Nova Scotia’s Department of Public Works describes the tool as showing winter maintenance activities taking place on provincially owned and maintained roadways. 

“In addition to showing you where our plows are operating during the winter season, Plowtracker also allows the user to turn on other information such as the provincial winter maintenance service levels, access to the provincial highway cameras, and the ability to see where winter maintenance activities have taken place within the last 30, 60, and 90 minutes,” the website notes. 

During last weekend’s snowfall event that buried parts of the province, the tool was in high demand.

But some rural residents who’ve relied on the plow tracking tool during snow dumps for the past few years say that this winter season, its functionality has diminished when compared to previous years.

‘Site is very important’

Meaghers Grant resident Joe Pay has used the plow tracker for the last three years. While he no longer works as a power engineer, when he did, he depended on the map to determine in advance whether or not he could get to work. 

If he was snowed in with no imminent chance of getting plowed out, he needed to let his boss know so someone else could take his shift.

“The site is very important. If a person can’t get out to work they can at least let their bosses know,” he said.

Pay said prior to this winter season, he had no issues with the map. It would clearly indicate if the equipment was a plow or a grader. This gave Pay and others in his corner of the Musquodoboit Valley a good idea about when they could expect to see local roadways cleared. 

“In previous years it’s worked very well. One of the annoying things now when it does work is that you can’t tell plows from graders. We know 99% of the time it will be a grader that does our road. But now you just see an arrow to indicate some sort of equipment,” Pay explained. 

“With the old site you typically knew a plow meant the main road was being done. It’s only this season that the site has been so unreliable and not showing the difference in vehicles.”

Hoping for a return to ‘real time’ vehicle tracking 

Pay said he’d like to see the plow tracker return to showing the specific types of equipment that are in operation. He also wants it to go back to showing the location of all equipment in real time while the vehicles are in motion. 

“Even last year it was showing not only the type of equipment, but the direction of travel so you could make at least an educated guess as to when to expect to be cleared out,” Pay said.

He believes all pieces of equipment, including those operated by contractors, should be equipped with tracking devices. He’d also like to see the site regularly updated to show exactly where equipment is located, including the direction of travel in real time. 

“Although the site is working it’s still painfully slow to load and the equipment that is showing will disappear,” Pay said, noting that particular issue is likely a result of spotty internet and cell service in the area. 

‘People might not even know it’s changed’

David Baxter is also disappointed in what the Plowtracker map now offers. Baxter lives in Balmoral Mills, a rural community in Colchester County. Until this winter season, he said he and his family actively relied on the tool. 

“One of the problems is, I think a lot of people might look at it and not even know that it’s changed because they didn’t actually use it. But we really did use it,” Baxter said in an interview. 

“We would be watching at 10:00 at night and we’d go to bed knowing, ‘Oh, I saw the grader. It’s down there. We know we’re going to be able to get out in the morning’ because it was doing the road that connects to ours. And if it’s doing that, then it’s going to come up and do ours. Whereas now, I don’t have any sense at all as to what’s going on.”

‘A bunch of anonymous blue arrows’

Like Pal, Baxter found the previous version of the map extremely helpful. He said he and his wife considered it a “godsend” when they first discovered it four years ago. They could easily and reliably tell how many graders — if any — were out on the roads, see where they had been, and the direction they were heading. 

“So we had a pretty good idea, generally, by watching that, when we were going to be the next road that they would do,” Baxter said.

“It was pretty easy to plan. We could say, ‘Well, we’re likely to get out of here in the next two to three hours’ if we saw a grader starting five kilometres away on the gravel road.”

By contrast, Baxter described the new map as “a bunch of anonymous blue arrows” that frustratingly no longer indicate the direction of travel. 

“I’m trying to figure out who made the decision to take a really useful, informative app and basically destroy it and turn it into garbage, which is what it is now,” he said. 

“It may have just been some bureaucratic decision. They got a different company to do it and they said, ‘Yeah, we can do this.’ And they didn’t even really look at what their option was, and they just got a deal on blue arrows.”

‘That’s all gone’

Baxter said he stopped using the app because it’s now “useless” because it no longer provides the specific and key information he once relied on.

“There was actually a picture of what looked like a grader or a truck and you could see where they were heading,” he recalled. “And when they came to an intersection and were turning around and working, you would see it working there for five minutes while it cleared up the corner and went on. And that’s all gone.”

For residents in his rural area, he said it was especially useful in situations where someone had a medical or dental appointment in four hours but couldn’t get out due to uncleared snow. If they spotted a piece of equipment on the map moving nearby, it was a safe bet that they’d be able to get out for their appointment in time. This meant they wouldn’t have to cancel. 

“Whereas if you just see a bunch of anonymous blue arrows and you have no idea where the movement is or what’s happening, you have to phone and cancel because you can’t risk it,” he said. 

‘Was really simple, smart and effective’

Baxter also questions why the technology that had been in place to provide real-time updates in past years has been removed and is no longer part of the map.

“Every person that has a cell phone, if you want to you can track every member of your family on their cell phone wherever they are,” Baxter said. 

“This was really simple and smart and effective. And it’s gone. And I don’t understand why it’s gone. That’s our question up here. What on earth happened to this?”

He said he first noticed the real time function had disappeared following a significant snowfall in early January.

“I went on the plow tracker and wondered ‘What’s this? Where did the graders go? Where did the trucks go?’ And there was no indication of it,” he recalled. 

When he began playing with the map, he also found that while he could see what was plowed within 30, 60, or 90 minutes, after that it disappears. He wonders why a plowed road can’t remain marked on the map for at least 24 hours before vanishing. 

“Leave that on for 24 hours until the event is over and everything’s been cleared. And then when you don’t need it anymore, you start from scratch,” Baxter said.

“If you happen to not tune in at exactly the right time in that hour or hour and a half, then you have no idea what has been done.”

Change has nothing to do with internet connectivity

Baxter said the loss of the real time function in particular is problematic for rural residents who sometimes have to walk great distances to see if a road has been plowed. In his case, it’s a quarter of a mile. 

“If you haven’t been plowed out and you’ve got a lot of snow, then you have to make a trek on snowshoes to go and see if there’s any point even trying to get your vehicle out,” Baxter said. 

“So, it’s just another example of something that had great utility and doesn’t now.”

Because he first noticed the changes at the beginning of the winter season and long before last week’s major storm, Baxter said it has nothing to do with internet connectivity or loading speed. He said he’d never had an issue with the map before this season.

“Seeing and knowing the type of equipment, the direction they’re moving in and having a permanent mark of what’s been cleared are all helpful,” Baxter said of the previous map. 

“The first two were there before and are now gone.”

Modifications made in recent upgrade

At the Nova Scotia Legislature last Thursday, Tim Bousquet asked Minister of Public Works Kim Masland to address complaints that the snow plow tracker map is “useless.” 

“It’s not useless. I actually look at the snowplow tracker myself. This storm, because of the significant amount of snow, there were a lot of people that were on the program, and it certainly was not loading to the speed that it should have,” Masland said.

“That was just because of the high usage. But certainly we’ll look at how we can strengthen that, and make it easier for folks.”

Bousquet pressed Masland, asking her to clarify if it wasn’t due to a recent update. 

“Not that I’m aware of. It was a result of so many people on at the same time trying to access it,” Masland said. 

In an email on Thursday, a spokesperson with the Department of Public Works told the Examiner that in combination with the province’s 511 system and highway cameras, the plow tracker assists the public in making informed decisions about routing and driving conditions.

“Given the severity of the recent winter storm, usage of the tracker was extremely high which at times slowed the system,” spokesperson Gary Andrea wrote late last week. Andrea continued:

There have been modifications to the Plow Tracker user interface as part of a recent upgrade to the department’s Automatic Vehicle Locator (AVL) system. The plow icons, legends, and steps to view the information have been changed, but the same information is available.

The upgrade now provides a menu where you can choose various layers to view, such as gravel roads as an example. Simply choose levels of service from the legend and gravel roads will show up in orange. Similarly, if you want to view where plows have been recently by clicking on the button to the right showing “Now” and choose a timeframe and the plows will show a trail of where they have been in the last 30, 60 or 90 minutes dependent on your choice.

Depending on a user’s browser speed, Andrea said the page can also take a few moments to load, “given the fair number of data points that need to be compiled.”  

Andrea concluded by noting that the department is “always open to public feedback to ensure we are providing an efficient system.”