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Trunk Road Gritter Tracker

scotgov.maps.arcgis.com

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Re: Trunk Road Gritter Tracker

#61

Post by jefftk »

KineticLensman wrote: post #56
zymhan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So kinda like riding a metro train, where the lines are named after the final destination.

Yes, although the London underground uses a slightly different convention. The lines have names like Northern, Central etc, and most are linear. The line level signage at a station usually directs you to an eastbound / westbound / northbound or southbound platform. The direction and destination of a specific train is indicated by the furthest stop in each direction (which can vary depending on whether the line bifurc…

Eastbound, no? Since Heathrow is West of the center?

Re: Trunk Road Gritter Tracker

#62

Post by alistairSH »

geerlingguy wrote: post #36
mirimir wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here we'd call them sanders or salters. It was an even bet for me between that and maintenance of oiled gravel roads. It's basically a lower cost version of asphalt. Every few years, they sprinkle some gravel, and spray with heavy oil. The odor is horrible, and vehicles get dirty.

Typically we refer to them as 'plows' or 'snowplows' in the US midwest regardless of what they're actually doing—they often (but not always) have a large plow on the front, and a salt/sand spreader on the back, or in some cases a sprayer that shoots out fine mist that gets your car all grimy and nasty for the next day or two.

The mist is called "brine", at least here in DC metro. It's usually applied before a winter weather event. Once the snow is down, we apply a normal salt/sand mix.

Re: Trunk Road Gritter Tracker

#63

Post by war1025 »

BuildTheRobots wrote: post #2

I'm amazed Scotland have a real time map with also how long ago a road was gritted - much respect to them. And the Gritter names are hilarious - but sadly don't (in my mind) beat Doncaster's "Gritsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Anti-Slip Machiney"

I think the data is already tracked by many jurisdictions, it's just a matter of exposing it publicly.

For instance, here [1] is the status of state plow trucks in Iowa. They also have a road conditions map that I believe is overlayed on that map as well. Currently there isn't much weather going on though so I think it doesn't show anything.

[1] https://iowadot.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html...

Re: Trunk Road Gritter Tracker

#65

Post by KineticLensman »

jefftk wrote: post #61
KineticLensman wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, although the London underground uses a slightly different convention. The lines have names like Northern, Central etc, and most are linear. The line level signage at a station usually directs you to an eastbound / westbound / northbound or southbound platform. The direction and destination of a specific train is indicated by the furthest stop in each direction (which can vary depending on whether the line bifurc…

Eastbound, no? Since Heathrow is West of the center?

Since Heathrow is to the West of the centre, you go westbound to get to it, from the centre.

Re: Trunk Road Gritter Tracker

#66

Post by parkersweb »

dairylee wrote: post #13
kingpiss wrote: post #8

I live in a warm place so I am out of touch, but isn't that like a lot of gritters for how small Scotland is?

The trunk road network is 2179 miles (3506km) long and there's ~120 gritters deployed. Doesn't seem like an unreasonable amount to me.

My Dad used to be a council civil engineer - every year he took turns deciding when to send the gritters out. There’s quite an art to deciding on a plan based on the road dew points, the precipitation forecast and the temperature. Precipitation washes the salt off - so that mileage often has to be covered multiple times over.

He used to get very nerdy over Christmas checking the road network data website :)

Re: Trunk Road Gritter Tracker

#67

Post by tialaramex »

squigg wrote: post #25
kingpiss wrote: post #8

I live in a warm place so I am out of touch, but isn't that like a lot of gritters for how small Scotland is?

Remember most of these "major" routes are single track A road at best, apart from our small motorway network. Once you are north of the central belt, where Glasgow and Edinburgh are, your main road can be anything but. This means they don't cover as much ground as you might expect, hence we do need quite a few of them. https://trafficscotland.org/livetrafficcameras/

Single Track means there is just one vehicle width shared both directions, if you meet someone coming the opposite way too bad, the next size up is Single Track with Passing Places (at intervals the road is wide enough for vehicles to pass in opposite directions). Not many Single Track A roads left in Britain, the A roads have mostly been upgraded even in Scotland. You're likely thinking of single Carriageway, which means there's only one road surface but it has separate lanes in each direction. Lots of those.

Re: Trunk Road Gritter Tracker

#69

Post by gbanfill »

ejo4041 wrote: post #16

Does anyone know what underlying technologies they are using? Anything opensource server or client side? What types of hardware do they use in the vehicles to send the GPS info?

I've worked on a couple. (https://ara.grittertracker.co.uk and https://manchester.grittertracker.co.uk for example).

These use an off the shelf telematics system from webfleet or masternaut (it's gps for location, vehicle data connection for odometer and speed etc and 3g card for data signal) that send data back to the telematics database.

There's the a public API to call to get most recent position or all route. We used the public API to grab positions and display on a map.

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