The Village of Schaumburg has received a Smart 50 Award from Smart Cities Connect for the village's innovations to enhance operations and communications of its snow and ice program.
The Smart 50 Awards annually recognize global smart cities projects, honoring the most innovative and influential work. Applicants were recognized for cutting-edge projects that demonstrated current and future municipal-scale impact and applications.
Schaumburg received the recognition for its custom-developed app to manage snow removal operations while also providing real-time tracking via a publicly accessible map called Snow Stat.
The first module of the program went live in 2018 and helped the village accurately manage its fleet of vehicles during snow operations. Several enhancements have been made since.
In 2019, the village's public Snow Stat map was introduced to provide near real-time insight to the location of the snow removal vehicles and general information on the snow event. New functionality was added in 2020, which included activity history and average clearing rate times for selected routes.
"The creation of these internal and public elements of our snow and ice command program application helps provide the village with critical information to assist with decision-making that is important to improve efficiency of our operations during snow events," Mayor Tom Dailly said in an announcement of the award. "What's really exciting is this program is accessible to the public. Residents and business can go online and see the progress of the snow/ice removal operations."