Snow Plow Trackers by State

Type the question into a search box and almost everything that comes back is a link to a state travel map. Those maps are worth having, but they answer a different question. A travel map is coloured by what a plow operator or a state trooper reported about the surface of the road. A plow tracker reads the position transmitter bolted to the truck and draws the truck. One tells you how the road was a few minutes ago. The other tells you whether anything has been down it.

19 states publish the second, and 8 of those go further and publish photographs taken from cameras mounted on the plows themselves, so a reader can watch a truck move and then look at what its driver is looking at. 7 states record a last pass, which is the single most useful field on the whole subject and the rarest: it is the difference between knowing a truck is two miles away and knowing one came past your turning forty minutes ago.

The thirty one without one are not the states you would guess. Wisconsin, New York, Ohio, Washington, Oregon all handle serious snow every winter and all publish road conditions rather than truck positions. Publishing a live fleet is a decision about data and about what a department wants to be held to, not a decision about snowfall.

There is no national vocabulary for the state of a road. Each department wrote its own scale, and the scales differ in length, in wording and in where they put the break between a road a driver can take and one the state would rather nobody took. One state’s map says partially covered. Another says slick in spots. A third distinguishes between travel not advised and no unnecessary travel, which sound identical and are not: one is advice and the other is the sentence a state uses just before it closes the road.

Only 17 of the 33 publish what their own labels mean. The rest colour the map with a phrase and leave the phrase to speak for itself. That is why every state page here prints that state’s own legend, in that state’s own order, with the definition where the state published one and a blank where it did not. Learning the words in one state is worth nothing the moment you cross a line.

It began as a way to get schoolchildren to look at a transport department’s website and turned into the most reliably delightful thing any of them do. The winning names go on the trucks, the trucks show up on the tracker under those names, and a reader watching the map at two in the morning during a storm gets to find out that the thing coming up their road is called something ridiculous.