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Plowing the LaSalle Street bridge sidewalk.
The Chicago Department of Transportation posted several photos to its Facebook page showing crews working at 5 AM Friday morning using a SW-4S tracked vehicle to clear snow from the Kinzie Street bike lane, and the sidewalk on the LaSalle Street bridge. Continue reading Photos of Chicago plowing sidewalks and the Kinzie Street bike lane
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Thursday was the first time the City of Chicago turned on Plow Tracker, a website that shows the location of every snow plow in the “Snow Command” I reported on last week.
The web application could use some improvement. When I loaded the website at 11:50 AM, the map never loaded – searching for “plow tracker” on Twitter brought up a flurry of messages about the website, leading me to presume that the server was overloaded. The remaining page elements took over 60 seconds to load. On a second load I saw the map appeared as did 183 iterations of the funky snow plow icon.
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A woman walks in the street after snowmageddon 2011. The City administration wants to avoid forcing people to walk in the street. Photo by Jim Watkins.
Mayor Emanuel announced on Tuesday, in a press release, a new website and effort to address snow shoveling and removal problems. The complete effort is packaged nicely on ChicagoShovels.org. It has many features, and I’ll focus on three (only one of which is available right now):
Continue reading Shovel it: How two ideas plan to impact sidewalk snow removal this winter