[ejdyksen]

Even better, the "MI Drive" site (for Michigan road conditions) actually shows live webcam footage from many (all?) of the DOT plows.

This is valuable during the winter to see the road conditions outside of areas like metro Detroit or Grand Rapids (which have fixed road cameras).

https://mdotjboss.state.mi.us/MiDrive/map?plows=true

EDIT: I mostly drive between Grand Rapids and Lansing, and I haven't looked in a while, but there are actually a lot of fixed cameras on major highways now, even outside metro areas:

https://mdotjboss.state.mi.us/MiDrive/map?cameras=true

[sandworm101]

The public information is an afterthought. Cameras on plows are a liability thing. Plows often hit things they simply cannot see, stuff covered in snow. But after a collision is is very hard to determine what if anything was under the snow prior to impact. There is no way to really avoid this problem while still plowing. So cameras protect the city/state/driver by showing what things looked like from the driver's perspective. That the streams are shared with the public is a bonus.

[k12sosse]

Ontario Canada, here. MIs neighbour to the East.

My city has two persons in the cab, one is the driver, one is the spotter. The spotter really just calls audibles on the stuff they see.

It's cheaper to hire that spotter than pay the insurance for single operator scenarios.

We can get some heavy snow days, the kind that make everything come to a standstill until things are cleared by these hulking beasts (kudos for naming one plow "hulk"). Having access to this information would be awesome.

Not surprising the home of the motor city would (appear) have their road clearing under control.

[sandworm101]

Most terrifying moment I ever had a car was passing a plow+sand trailer on the colloquial highway (BC). He was plowing the right lane and I was following semi trucks passing in the relatively clear left lane. Right as I got beside the plow's trailer it jackknifed 45 degrees away from me. I though we were all going to die in a huge pileup. But it turned out to be one of these. I had seen them many times. I had never seen one engage the second plow while going 60mph. I did not know they could do it on the move.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJEgkbq_b2Q

[k12sosse]

That's wild. Thank you for sharing.

[paledot]

And rightly so - just about every year there's a news article about another pedestrian or cyclist killed by a snowplow here in Montreal.

[k12sosse]

That's exactly it. The unfortunate truth about the operators is they're under intense pressure to perform under harsh time constraints.

They're out there before the snow falls, during the snowfall and until the snow is off the road operating essentially a multi-ton switchblade in darkness where everything is hidden beneath an opaque blanket of frozen water. And your vehicle (before the blade is attached) is as wide as the lane.

The visibility conditions are bad, the road surface is bad (that's why you're out there!) And your boss is remotely monitoring your every movement, questioning every work stoppage as if stopping for a coffee, or to take a dump is going to bankrupt the economy. Even operating 'just' the sidewalk plows seems super stressful.

I have had close friends who were the spotters for 40-year veteran operators, it seems like a huge rush that (despite all these challenges) could be kind of fun.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/london-ontario-snowplo...

[notatoad]

it being an afterthought is, imho, what makes it so excellent. the attitude of "we collected this data, might as well make it public" is exactly how governments should operate.

[snazz]

MnDOT offers similar services (plow and fixed cameras, along with lots of other traffic information) for Minnesota as well: https://511mn.org. If you're really bored, it can be fun to track incoming snowstorms across all of the fixed cameras in a certain direction!

[Blackthorn]

That's a fantastic use of IT in government. Props to whoever came up with that idea and the group that implemented it.

[ReactiveJelly]

"Why don't we open up the feeds from ALPR cameras as a limited hang-out?"

[myself248]

Ehh, the RCOC speed cameras have been open since the early 2000's. I don't think they have the resolution nor the bandwidth for ALPR, but they're supremely useful for checking traffic. I get more from a visual than from colored streets on a map.

http://www2.rcocweb.org/TrafficWebNT/Index.html

[throwaway0a5e]

"because then the citizenry will know how surveilled they are and they might put pressure on politicians to curtail our ability to buy cool tech without voersight"

"we'll just downgrade it from 4k to 1080p and we'll only give them access to half of them"

[SkyPuncher]

This is fantastic! My wife and I often drive US-2. It can be a gamble in inclement weather.

This is really helpful for understanding conditions in the lesser traveled parts of the state.

[whalesalad]

Love watching the plows during a storm and seeing the live updates on their state: salting, plowing, etc.

[LegitShady]

the "Transportation" name for those fixed camera systems are "Rwis" (Road Weather Information System) stations. Definitely check them out before you highway drive but also be aware that changing weather conditions can make roads slippery or otherwise dangerous.

The plow cameras and sensors (plow position, salt/aggregate activity, etc) are more useful for transportation operations staff to know what's been plowed and what still needs plowing but technically do take pictures of the whole highway instead of just the rwis stations.

[earleybird]

Worked on this one some time ago[0]. Webcams are a big reason folks come to the site. Clicking on the "Princeton" icon get you a popup of the current image and clicking on that gets you the detail page[1]. On the detail page there is a "Replay the day" button which will "card flip" the images for the last 24hrs to give you a sense of what conditions have been like (no time machine yet :-) ).

Site went live back in 2005 with the current look appearing around about 2009 (memory is getting fuzzy).

Baseline network activity on a typical day ran about 4 MByte/sec continuous; on "snow days"[2] the load increases an order of magnitude to 24 MByte/second. That was 5+ years ago - I expect there's been growth since then.

[0] https://drivebc.ca/#mapView&z=11&ll=49.485664%2C-120.367187

[1] https://images.drivebc.ca/bchighwaycam/pub/html/dbc/452.html

[2] "Snow day" might be "the Coquihalla is getting about 50cm over the next 12 hours"

[avs733]

today I learned the name of RWIS cameras.

I actually used one recently. My wife was caught in a traffic jam due to an accident/car fire. I was able to actually find a visual of her car on the highway from my laptop. She had our baby in the car who was screaming and I was able to narrate what was happening with the accident - which gave her enough time to change a diaper while stopped and then get safely back in the driver seat before traffic started moving.

[aghilmort]

yeah, @DriveSpotter worked with some snowplow fleets for a bit -- some states are way ahead of others on sharing cam & coverage data!