The city of Bend is developing a dashboard that will take the guesswork out of which streets have been plowed this winter.

The Transportation and Mobility Department said its new dashboard will allow people to track the progress of the city’s fleet of snowplows as they move through the city.

Transportation and Mobility Director David Abbas said the dashboard could be available early this winter, but the team needs a few winter storms to test the systems before rolling it out to the public.

“We’ve got the system in the vehicles and added sensors to them, and we are working on a dashboard and the type of information we can push out now,” Abbas said.

More Coverage

City of Bend to launch new app for service requests in November

This project has been in the works for the past couple of years, said Abbas, and the pilot program has been successful so far. It’s been a joint effort, he expanded, with the fleet department that maintains all of the city’s vehicles.

Although the tracking system will have about a 30-minute delay, the new technology will allow the department to accumulate better data for plowing operations to come. It will also allow fleet operations to more closely monitor plows to make repairs and maintenance more efficient.

“We are just trying to be as effective and efficient in our work. This kind of technology helps us, but if we can have some public-facing information, I think that could be good for the community as well,” Abbas said.

In addition to location, sensors installed on the plows can determine if the blade and the brush — the parts that clean the road — are up or down. Abbas said the city is working to also integrate its sander units into the program.

This tracking platform builds on the Transportation and Mobility Department’s existing snowplow protocols, which schedule streets for clearing based on priorities.

Priority one for city plows: major collectors and arterial roads, which are streets that provide a network for emergency services and connect high-volume streets. On its website, the city lists the highest priority roads as:

• Third Street
• 27th Street
• Brookswood Boulevard
• Butler Market Road
• Century Drive
• Franklin Avenue
• Knott Road
• Mt. Washington Drive
• Neff Road
• Newport Avenue
• Olney Avenue
• Penn Avenue
• Reed Market Road

Next, the plows are directed to streets that provide access to priority one routes, such as routes to medical facilities, schools and major employment centers. Streets that require special attention, either due to curves or gradients, are also listed under priority two.

Finally, snowplows deploy to residential streets. They will not plow private roads, which are the responsibility of the property owners.

More Information

More Information

For more detail on which streets are a priority for plowing, visit the city of Bend’s Winter Street Operations website

Although Abbas could not say when the snowplow tracking system would be available to the public, he did say it would likely be available through the city’s website, as well as through social media and other channels.