PITTSBURGH — Every year, the snow falls, and the plows hit the street. The first concern for a lot of the residents is, “Why is the plow not in my neighborhood yet?”
“The thing they are most looking for is how many trucks are in a different district compared to my district,” said Anthony Coghill, a Pittsburgh City councilman.
Coghill is outspoken when it comes to the problems with the city’s plow truck tracker.
“If you are going less than five miles per hour, which we do many times going down the steep hills. it doesn’t show up on the tracker, so they have no clue it’s there,” Coghill said.
Despite all that the council voted to renew the $220,000 contract with the technology company.
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“To me that was a big deal — how much are we paying for this problem is the way I’m looking at it. It’s only $7,000,” Coghill said.
Coghill said that’s all it costs for the actual tracker portion. He said the other funds in the contract go to GPS for the plows and technology to optimize snow removal.
If it was more, he would have voted no and bought more resources to actually plow the snow.
“If it could afford us another truck with a plow on it I’d much rather have that instead of giving people the convenience of knowing where the trucks are, but turns out it doesn’t actually add up to that much, and I’ll swallow that pill,” Coghill said.
He told Channel 11 there is still the question of if the tracker is overall beneficial to the public or if it would be better used internally.
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