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Mayor Bloomberg’s big GPS initiative, where millions of dollars worth of GPS tracking devices were attached to the city’s fire and waste management vehicles, is looking like a giant waste of taxpayer money.  The comptroller, when looking for the specific locations of the city’s vehicles, says that the image on the screen may sometimes show the vehicle appearing as if it is in New York Harbor.

This is discouraging news, as the GPS devices were custom designed for the city’s specific needs at a ridiculous cost.  For a single waste management vehicle GPS unit alone, it cost up to $56,000.

City comptroller John Liu says, “Once again, millions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted on technology that falls short of what’s promised, raising questions about the oversight of expensive outside consultants.” Liu is a vocal opponent of the Bloomberg administration’s freely spending funds on doomed technology initiatives such as CityTime, a payroll system that flopped fast.

Liu breaks it down quite simply, stating the GPS project is “a classic case of what not to do – build a complex new system when simple, already available consumer-oriented devices could do the job at a fraction of the cost.” It is said Liu will be running in the next mayoral race.

Not only did the GPS units often show fire trucks inside of a garage when the trucks were actually on the scene of a fire, the devices would also show trucks that were smack in the middle of the New York Harbor or Long Island Sound.

The administration is attempting to justify per unit price tag of almost $11,000 by stating it’s all for the sake of resident safety, claiming it will eventually help firefighters navigate the quickest route possible to an emergency (which, by the way, they are requesting an additional $4.3 million for.)  Auditors brushed this aside, pointing out that the vast majority of drivers knew their way around the city without any help.

As for city sanitation trucks, their devices were also plagued with issues, the worst of all being that the system often didn’t work.  A supervisor reported (in December, mind you) that some of the vehicles being tracked weren’t showing up at all since July.  The 12 sanitation supervisors were outfitted with tablet computers, which they claim were unusable at least once per week.

After the December 2010 snowstorms, the Sanitation Department decided to equip drivers with GPS enabled cell phones instead, saving loads of money.  However, auditors claim that this, too, was problematic as workers realized they could disable tracking by switching the phones to airplane mode, as well as log on to Facebook and other popular social networking sites while working.

It seems that officials in New York have learned an age-old lesson from this GPS catastrophe: attempting to reinvent the wheel never pans out.

Article Written by Khristen Foss