Anchorage city officials announced a new website Tuesday that they say serves as a one-stop shop for snowplowing information. The launch coincides with the season’s first major snowfall, and follows recent winters where record-breaking storms led to snow-clogged streets that disrupted life in the city for days.
Brendan Babb said before the new website, various snowplowing information was spread across eight different Anchorage city web pages, crossing numerous departments.
“There’s 12 departments that interact with snowplowing, and we’ve been meeting regularly for the last three months and trying to come up with creative solutions,” Babb said.
Babb heads the city’s innovation team, and he said they wanted to create a single spot online where residents could find all the snowplow information they may need.
“Our framing the whole time was, if you know it’s snowing overnight and you wake up in the morning and you pick up your phone off the nightstand and go to muni.org/plow, what information do you want to see to start making decisions about your day?” Babb said.
The result is a website with a series of maps, including one of the status of sidewalk clearing and another for neighborhood roads. Plus, you can report a snow-related safety hazard and request a bus stop get cleared. You can even get information on which agency owns which roads and on how to report property damage from a snowplow.
Updates on snow clearing begin coming in to the site at roughly 6:30 a.m. every day.
Michael Knapp heads the city’s geographic information system, or GIS, department. He said during any plow schedule, arterial roads — the main roads that see the most traffic — are always plowed first. Then the plows move into residential neighborhoods.
“Street maintenance has divided the Anchorage Bowl into 50-something sectors,” Knapp said. “And that is how, internally, for years, they have conveyed where they’re sending graders out to clear residential streets.”
The snow plow plans alternate between A and B, so if your streets were cleared first during this storm, they’ll be plowed last during the next one.
“The goal is equity, so we’re not always just plowing [the same sector] first each time,” Babb said. “So it’s really to kind of break that up. But yeah, you could do some future planning that way.”
Babb said the innovation team already has plans for some updates to the site, including putting GPS trackers on all of the snowplows.
“We’ll work with the GIS to have a public facing map so you can see,” Babb said. “It’s not quite like Pac Man, but you’ll see 30 plows moving around, and know kind of the areas or know what roads have been plowed.”
Babb said he appreciates the cross-department collaboration that led to the snowplow website. He said the site adds to the transparency that Mayor Suzanne LaFrance’s administration has already provided about the snowplow struggles it will face this year.
“We know we don’t have new plows until next year,” Babb said. “We probably don’t have more plowers, and we don’t have new GPS yet. So what are creative ways we can do a better job at plowing the roads and communicate to the residents to let them know what’s going on?”
Babb said his team plans on making regular updates to the website in the coming months.
The site also has a section where residents can provide feedback, and Babb said he hopes that people will reach out with their struggles and their own suggestions for how to make the site easier to use.
Wesley Early covers Anchorage life and city politics for Alaska Public Media. Reach him at wearly@alaskapublic.org and follow him on X at @wesley_early. Read more about Wesley here.
