Pennsylvania Snow Plow Tracker and Road Conditions

Q: Where can I see where the plows are in Pennsylvania?

PennDOT calls it Track My Plow, and it runs at https://www.511pa.com/. PennDOT describes it this way: "The public can view all of PennDOT's snow plows on the road during a winter storm at www.511PA.com."

Q: What is 511PA?

511PA is Pennsylvania Department of Transportation's own travel information service. 511PA carries traffic cameras, a phone app called 511PA app and a phone line at 511. PennDOT describes it this way: "Provides up to the minute traffic and transit information for Pennsylvania. View the real time traffic map with travel times, traffic accident details, traffic cameras and other road conditions."

Trucks on the map

What the state publishes

Live truck positions

511PA

The map

PennDOT, Pennsylvania Department of Transportation

6

Words on the map

printed without definitions

Yes

Roadside cameras

on the same map, pointed at the road itself

The answer

Where the plows are in Pennsylvania

Trucks on the map

PennDOT publishes where its plows are and when a plow last came past on 511PA.

A reader can see which roads have a truck on them right now. Whether one has already been past is a separate question the layer may or may not answer.

What the state calls it: Track My Plow
Where it lives: 511PA
Shows a last pass: Yes. The layer records when a truck was last down a road, not only where one is now.
Trucks in the fleet: 2,200
How often it updates: PennDOT says each truck's location and material spreading are logged and shared in real time, and the map's plow layer also draws where trucks have been, from now back six hours on a route and from six to twelve hours on any route.
By phone: 511

Open Track My Plow

PennDOT describes it in its own words, from Where's My Plow, Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, read September 23, 2026.

The public can view all of PennDOT's snow plows on the road during a winter storm at www.511PA.com.

Where's My Plow, Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, read September 23, 2026. Read it at the source

The map

What 511PA shows

511PA carries traffic cameras, a phone app called 511PA app and a phone line at 511. PennDOT describes it this way: "Provides up to the minute traffic and transit information for Pennsylvania. View the real time traffic map with travel times, traffic accident details, traffic cameras and other road conditions."

Conditions on any state map are reported rather than measured. A plow operator or a trooper enters what they saw, and the map carries it until somebody enters something else, so a colour is a description of the road a while ago on the stretch the person was looking at.

Pennsylvania is one of the states that puts the trucks themselves on the map: every PennDOT plow carries automatic vehicle location, so 511PA shows plows working during a storm and the tracks they left over the last several hours, alongside a road condition colour from normal to impassable.

The map: 511PA
Cameras: Roadside cameras
Phone app: 511PA app
Phone line: 511

511PA, Pennsylvania Department of Transportation

Provides up to the minute traffic and transit information for Pennsylvania. View the real time traffic map with travel times, traffic accident details, traffic cameras and other road conditions.

511PA, Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, read September 23, 2026. Read it at the source

The words

What Pennsylvania calls each state of a road

PennDOT runs 6 steps on 511PA, from Normal Conditions to Impassable. PennDOT prints the labels without defining them.

These are Pennsylvania’s words and they stop at the state line. There is no national scale: the 33 states that publish a legend use 166 different labels between them, and only 17 publish what their own labels mean. A phrase that means one thing here means something else, or nothing, one state over.

PennDOT’s own labels, in the order PennDOT lists them. The state prints these labels without defining them.
What the map says
Normal Conditions
Wet with Freezing Conditions
Snow and / or Slush Covered
Snow Packed / Significant Snow Cover
Icy
Impassable

Read from PennDOT’s own legend on September 23, 2026.

When a road shuts

Who closes a road in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania's winter storm tool is a tiered restriction on commercial vehicles rather than a blanket closure, and three agencies decide it together and revisit it every hour.

PennDOT, the Pennsylvania State Police, and the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency assess each winter weather forecast to determine if CMV restrictions are warranted. Then, they review the restrictions hourly once they have been initiated to determine if the conditions warrant the restriction or can be lifted.

511PA, Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, read September 23, 2026. Read it at the source

A closure is a different thing from a bad condition, and it is the one entry on the map that carries the force of law behind it. Driving past a closure device is an offence in most states and a rescue bill in several. The map is where the closure is published.

A red and white striped gate padlocked shut across a two lane forest highway with a ROAD CLOSED sign at its centre, photographed at road level along the wet double yellow line — A seasonal gate shut across a state highway, with no snow on the ground yet. Closures like this one go on by the calendar rather than by the storm, and a driver who checks the map in November finds the road already gone. That is the quietest and most useful thing these maps do, and it happens weeks before anybody looks for a plow. “The gates are closed (49097728041)”, Oregon Department of Transportation, CC BY 2.0

Pennsylvania snow plow tracker questions

Does Pennsylvania have a snow plow tracker?

Where can I see where the plows are in Pennsylvania?

What is 511PA?

What do the road condition colours mean in Pennsylvania?

Who closes a road in Pennsylvania?

Pennsylvania's winter storm tool is a tiered restriction on commercial vehicles rather than a blanket closure, and three agencies decide it together and revisit it every hour. PennDOT puts it this way: "PennDOT, the Pennsylvania State Police, and the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency assess each winter weather forecast to determine if CMV restrictions are warranted. Then, they review the restrictions hourly once they have been initiated to determine if the conditions warrant the restriction or can be lifted."

A plow truck seen from behind in heavy snowfall casting a wide plume of snow off the left shoulder of an interstate, with one dark treated lane running away to the right — The same event from behind: the truck throwing its wing load onto the shoulder, and beside it the dark strip of lane it has already been down. That contrast between the wet black lane and the white one is the physical thing a road map is reporting when it changes a segment from snow covered to wet, and it is why the colour on the map can be right and the road can still be slick. “Snowplow on Interstate 5 in Everett, Washington”, SounderBruce, CC BY-SA 4.0

Plow trackers in other states

Pennsylvania studded tire datesWhen studs are legal on Pennsylvania roads, and the penalty when they are not.Mountain pass conditionsThe passes that close, and what each state posts when they do.Studded tire laws by stateThe dates studs are legal, state by state.Lake effect snowWhere the bands set up and what they do to a commute.Plow trackers in every stateWhich states show the trucks, which show only the roads, and what their legends say.

Pennsylvania read September 23, 2026 from 511PA, Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, linked above. Departments replace these services between seasons and a layer that ran last winter may not run this one, so PennDOT’s own page is the one that governs. Conditions shown on it are reported by people and lag the road. Every state is on the snow plow tracker hub.