New York City – Rigor mortis had set in by the time Joseph Mauro, a supervisor with the Department of Sanitation, drove by a dead opossum on Park Drive East in the Kew Gardens Hills section of Queens.
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Checking a map on the computer mounted on his dashboard, Mr. Mauro located a garbage truck a block away, and within a few minutes its two-person crew had scooped the opossum into the compactor.
“Before, it would have taken 10 minutes to find a truck, bring it here and get this cleaned up,” he said. “Now, I can look right on the map.”
Locating vehicles is one of ways the Department of Sanitation and other city agencies are using the city’s new $500 million high-speed wireless secure data network, one of the largest of its kind in the world. The network, known as Nycwin, was built by Northrop Grumman and by summer’s end will include about 400 cellular antennas covering 95 percent of the city.
The idea is for city agencies to use network-connected hand-held devices and tablet computers to increase efficiency and flexibility: Soon, police officers will be able to view photographs of suspects from their cars, fire chiefs will be able to watch live video of fires taken from traffic helicopters above, and housing inspectors will be capable of looking up building plans while on location.
“This extends the office to the field,” said Paul J. Cosgrave, the commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, which has overseen the construction of the network. “We traditionally grew in silos, but this network allows us to grow together.”
The need for a shared and secure network has been a priority since at least Sept. 11, 2001, when police and fire officials could not communicate at the World Trade Center because their radios operated on different frequencies.
Though Nycwin does not yet handle voice calls, it sends data about 50 times faster than the networks now used by emergency workers and lets all city departments share information more easily.
ut labor unions representing municipal workers are worried that the network, which can track movements down to the minute, might be used to benchmark performance in ways that could penalize workers.
Satellite technology “can be used for very good things to give the public service,” said Harry Nespoli, president of the Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association Local 831. “But if they are going to turn around and nickel and dime my work force, I don’t think that G.P.S. should be used for that.”
Sanitation Department supervisors in Queens have been the first to experiment with the new system.
Mr. Mauro logged on to the computer in his city car at 6:40 one recent morning before he left the department’s truck depot near Kennedy Airport. He immediately saw a blue line, or geo-fence, outlining the Queens district that is roughly bordered by the Long Island Expressway, Grand Central Parkway, Cunningham Park and Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.
Three of the four garbage trucks on duty were heading north on the Van Wyck Expressway and one had already arrived in the district. One had barely left the depot by the 6:30 deadline. As each truck entered the district, Mr. Mauro’s screen flashed red with an alert; a similar flash comes to supervisors whenever a truck leaves the district or encounters mechanical problems.
If a truck leaves late, that also generates an alert.
so now i wont we ticketed for parking on a block AFTER the garbage truck passed already? as the cop can see if the truck passed or not