As snow piled up in front of bus stops and fire hydrants during New York City’s second winter storm of the year, city workers have tried to move fast to remove it before snow hardened into ice. A new internal tool makes that job easier to track.

The city’s Department of Sanitation (DSNY) now tags infrastructure that’s been plowed in a mobile mapping tool that employees can update on the go.

“We have started the work of geotagging every single bus shelter and crosswalk,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Monday, and overnight, he said the city cleared more than 1,600 crosswalks, 419 fire hydrants, and nearly 900 bus stops.

DSNY handles trash collection, but it’s also tasked with snow removal from city streets and bike lanes, areas within its legal obligation. DSNY sometimes provides supplemental services too, plowing pedestrian infrastructure like curb ramps, unsheltered bus stops, and fire hydrants that property owners are responsible for.

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In the past, this supplemental work was done piecemeal, but under Mamdani, the amount of supplemental service has “vastly increased,” says Joshua Goodman, a DSNY deputy commissioner. “That necessitated a need to formally track this work,” he says.

Cities from Bellevue, Washington, to Syracuse, New York, use digital maps to show residents when streets get plowed, and New Yorkers can track when their streets were last plowed on PlowNYC, a public site launched in 2013. DSNY needed its own PlowNYC, but for bus stops and more.

“We developed an internal mapping tool, and Sanitation Supervisors make live updates from the field when one of these locations in their assigned section is complete,” Goodman tells Fast Company. “So maybe it’s a bit simpler than the terminology implies—it’s essentially someone making updates to a central database on their work cell phone—but it’s a big development for us, especially so quickly.”

© Fast Company