Three hundred snowplows come to life when winter whips the Windy City. The thriving midwestern metropolis is often buried in snow when that winter weather hits, and the fight to make the city move again is key to its commerce and workforce. Chicago’s two and a half million residents need to go to work, take their children to school, and purchase food and other essentials.
A seemingly endless series of streets, backstreets, diagonal streets, alleyways, and tunnels allow the city to stay in motion. The city’s suburbs, including Munster, Griffith, Whiting, Oak Lawn, Evergreen Park, Channahon, Evanston, and countless others need to be kept snow free so Chicago can function. With three hundred snowplows and nearly three million people, it just can’t all be done right away.
As with any case where there are not enough resources to get a big job done right away, some citizens of Chicago are not happy. Chicagoans commonly complain of a bias in the city, in which certain neighborhoods are plowed before others. They claim that better neighborhoods—especially, of course, Mayor Rahm Immanuel’s—get faster service.
The city’s administration has found a unique way to address those claims: GPS tracking.
Chicago has created ChicagoShovels.org. The site permits visitors to track each and every one of the Windy City’s three hundred snowplows. Users can then make their own judgment as to whether preferential plowing is taking place. If the city cannot buy more snowplows, then installing GPS tracking units is a unique and innovative solution for the Immanuel administration to provide transparency—and hopefully make for a happier city with fewer complaints.
There is no way to shut off the weather in Chicago. However, an efficient snowplow system gets the city moving faster. And with new GPS tracking equipment installed on its snowplows, hopefully a more peaceable, patient people will wait as those plows allow the heartbeat of the Midwest to keep pumping.
