MONTPELIER — The Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans) announced the launch of the Winter Central web portal, a new site to help drivers navigate winter conditions in Vermont. Included in the new portal is Plow Finder, a map that will show the location of all 250 VTransplow trucks in near real-time. The heart of the Plow Finder map is the data from the Automatic Vehicle Location System installed in each truck and augmented by information from the National Weather Service, New England Compass, VTrans’ weather stations and point forecast modeling provided by DarkSky.
“Finding ways to turn the vast amounts of data we have at our disposal into information that is useful to the traveling public is an ongoing project at VTrans,” said VTransChief Engineer Kevin Marshia. “We have applied many of the same tools we used to show summer construction activity to bring information sources together in a way that can help drivers make better decisions.”
Truck locations are transmitted once a minute via cellular modem and users can look back in time up to an hour to see where the trucks have been. Because of the nature of cellular service in Vermont, there will be breaks in the trails and not all trucks will display all the time. A few of the more popular features from New England Compass can also be displayed along with the plows including National Weather Service Alerts, Doppler radar, weather cameras and countywide condition alerts. Users can choose which base map to use and turn all the features on or off.
Find the Winter Central portal at http://vtrans.vermont.gov/operations/winter or go straight to the trucks at http://plowtrucks.vtrans.vermont.gov.