> I'm amazed Scotland have a real time map with also how long ago a road was gritted - much respect to them.

We've the same over in the Netherlands, even including temperature of the road surface - see https://www.rijkswaterstaatstrooit.nl/.

> And the Gritter names are hilarious - but sadly don't (in my mind) beat Doncaster's "Gritsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Anti-Slip Machiney"

There's so much scope here. I'm surprised that "Grits 'n' Giggles" hasn't been used, for example, and there are plenty of others:

- Grittystar Galactica

- Gritty End of the Stick

- Brad Grit

- Lord of the Flings

I should stop. Possibly I shouldn't have started.

I'm pleased to see they have a 'Mr Plow' in there, for the Simpsons reference!

I think the data is already tracked by many jurisdictions, it's just a matter of exposing it publicly.

For instance, here [1] is the status of state plow trucks in Iowa. They also have a road conditions map that I believe is overlayed on that map as well. Currently there isn't much weather going on though so I think it doesn't show anything.

[1] https://iowadot.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html...

I'm even more amazed, since it seems the damned things only come out about twice a year, at least in the North East!

That is correct - "trunk" as in body, so the main roads are trunk roads. The vans spread rock salt (which we call grit), hence called gritters! We Scots always get confused in the states when offered grits for breakfast .... Sadly it does mean you have to look after your car in winter, as that salt does wonders for chassis rust - you have to keep the car clean!

"Main road" is actually considerably more general than trunk road in the Great Britain. The roads in GB are ordered hierarchically starting with motorways (although these have restrictions, ie. motorvehicles only), through trunk roads, primary, secondary, all the way down to byway.

It is important for navigation in GB. When you want to go somewhere you are supposed to use trunk roads to navigate to the first town/city on the trunk network beyond where you are going. The signs are coloured to indicate you are on the trunk network. Then as you approach your actual destination you will begin to see it signposted on the local non-trunk roads, at which point you leave the trunk roads.

This has been mostly forgotten in this age of GPS navigation, though, and many signs are in a poor state of repair or badly occluded by trees or shrubbery.

Surely if you're planning to drive on the road, you'd want the webcam to be behind the snow plow?

Same just down the road, but they're also service vehicles, so they're out and about regularly. http://hamilton.plowtracker.com/

Zoom in until the names appear on the map, you don't have to select each vehicle - sadly they don't all have names.

Huh. Doing a search by name allows me to find some. But only the ones I've searched for by name _have_ a name. The rest have no name when I click on them. That's...weird.

David Plowie!

Salt, rocks and lots of diesel.

I've worked on a couple. (https://ara.grittertracker.co.uk and https://manchester.grittertracker.co.uk for example).

These use an off the shelf telematics system from webfleet or masternaut (it's gps for location, vehicle data connection for odometer and speed etc and 3g card for data signal) that send data back to the telematics database.

There's the a public API to call to get most recent position or all route. We used the public API to grab positions and display on a map.

ESRI's ArcGIS server. No, not open source.

In the Midwest (Chicago) I've usually heard them referred to as just "snowplows" or "plows", which also carried salt and spread it behind them as they plowed.

Incidentally, Chicago also has a a real time plow tracker: https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/streets/supp_info/plow...

Here we'd call them sanders or salters.

It was an even bet for me between that and maintenance of oiled gravel roads. It's basically a lower cost version of asphalt. Every few years, they sprinkle some gravel, and spray with heavy oil. The odor is horrible, and vehicles get dirty.

Yeah, i believe it’s done via the Vodafone network.

Cell coverage is something like 95% of land and 99.something% of population.

2179/120 means each one has to cover about 18 miles. Assuming they average 36 mph, assuming each trunk road is 2 lanes in both directions (assuming one pass per lane and not including time to clean up the shoulder/median), and assuming they spend 50% of their time gritting/plowing new roads rather than filling up/changing drivers/driving on plowed roads to get to or from their target road, that's one pass every four hours. Seems quite reasonable (if a bit undersized) to me as a Michigander.

We're having unseasonably warm weather here - it's 45 and sunny instead of a typical 25 and overcast - so all the snow has melted in Southwest Michigan and our state plow tracking map is basically blank today:

https://mdotjboss.state.mi.us/MiDrive/map

We have about 800 snowplows to cover 12,000 miles of state/trunk roads (15 miles per vehicle). It requires about 2,000 operators to keep those 800 plow trucks running 24x7 when it's really snowing.

My Dad used to be a council civil engineer - every year he took turns deciding when to send the gritters out. There’s quite an art to deciding on a plan based on the road dew points, the precipitation forecast and the temperature. Precipitation washes the salt off - so that mileage often has to be covered multiple times over.

He used to get very nerdy over Christmas checking the road network data website :)

Single Track means there is just one vehicle width shared both directions, if you meet someone coming the opposite way too bad, the next size up is Single Track with Passing Places (at intervals the road is wide enough for vehicles to pass in opposite directions). Not many Single Track A roads left in Britain, the A roads have mostly been upgraded even in Scotland. You're likely thinking of single Carriageway, which means there's only one road surface but it has separate lanes in each direction. Lots of those.

Which can be much harder to keep clear. Here in Minnesota, USA we get both large amounts of snow and high winds. It's not unusual to have whiteout blizzard conditions and MNDot (Department of Transportation) warning against any travel in some parts of the state..

They can clear a road only to have the wind cover it with snow again an hour later.

I live on top of a hill so I'm well acquainted with what happens when winds gust to 40mph after Mother Nature has dumped 6" of snow on us. Wind-packed snowdrifts suck ass!

Do you get icy-freeze-thaw conditions? Here in DC, we don't get a ton of snow, but when we do get winter weather, it's always just at freezing, so everything immediately gets thawed and re-frozen into ice. Most of my trips to Scotland have been summer, so only had snow up Glen Shee. The one time I visited in winter, it snowed a bit as I drove between Laggan and Dunkeld, but nothing dangerous.