The first snow storm of 2017 revealed potentially disastrous problems with the city’s official “PlowNYC” tracking system — with one pol demanding a hearing on the debacle.
City Councilman Rory Lancman (D-Queens) called for a public he🍌aring on the balky Web site, which he said falsely depicted Queens roads as having been cleared wౠhen they were really still blanketed in snow.
Lancman said a “worst-case scenario” would leave people trapped in their homes, with cops, firefighters and paramedics unable to reach them in case of an emergency.
“We saw this movie last year and we don’t want a sequel,” Lancman told The Post.
“If the city doesn’t plow the streets, and it doesn’t know which streets have been plowed, lives can be at risk.”
Unofficial snowfall tallies recorded by the National Weather Service ranged from a high of 8.2 inches at JFK Airport to a low of 4 inches in Brooklyn’s Bergen Beach neighborhood.
Lancman also took to Twitter to vent his outrage and knock Mayor Bill de Blasio and the Sanitation Department over PlowNYC’s bad data.
“This is the second year in a row that PlowNYC is calling streets plowed which aren’t, leaving my constituents frustrated at a lack of information and concerned that their streets are being ignored based on PlowNYC’s faulty data,”
“If PlowNYC can’t get it right after a minor snowfall, what will happen when we have a real storm?”
Earlier, he posted three videos shot from the passenger side of a car traveling on snow-covered streets, saying the roadways in Hillcrest and Fresh Meadows were “not looking too plowed” and “hardly touched if at all.”
Lancman also posted 💦screenshots of from the PlowNYC map that purported to show the streets had been plowed within the past hour.
“There’s ze🐈ro chance these #plownyc maps are accur🌌ate,” he tweeted.
Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia claimed “every indication we have” showed that “the GPS system worked fine,” but admitted there could have been some isolated problems.”
Garcia also said she was willing to sit down with Lancman and the city’s Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications “to do a deep dive” on the data.
Lancman responded by saying that PlowNYC was suffering from “a systemic problem, and I don’t know why the commissioner refuses to acknowledge it as a systemic problem.”
“As long as the mayor is willing to give cover to a department that uses a broken app, I guess the commissioner can say whatever she wants,” he added.
Meanwhile, the city said altܫernate-side-of-the-street parking rules will be suspended on Monday for snow-removal operations. Parking-meter regulations will remain in effect.
In January 2014, then-Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty blamed a busted GPS for a PlowNYC map that showed Manhattan’s Upper East Side had been ignored during a snow storm that paralyzed the neighborhood, stranding a long line of buses and leaving pedestrians unable to cross the streets.
De Blaiso initially claimed the upper-crust area got the same treatment as the rest of the city, but later conceded: “The orders were given, the execution was not what it should have been.”
Doherty announced his resignation less than two ▨months after the debacle.
When then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled PlowNYC in 2013, he said the Web site offered a stripped-down version of a “much more sophisticated and hard-to-use version” employed by the Sanitation Department, which tracks its fleet of plows with GPS devices.
Bloomberg said Sanitation bosses “can actually talk to and know where every single plow is, knowing the number of the plow, and you can look up the name of the driver and know how fast they’re going and all that kind of information that’s useful for managing the plowing and sanding fleet.”
For the public, Bloomberg claimed: “Plug in your address, be careful to do it accurately, and you will find out when the last time a plow went down your street.”