As municipalities prepare for the challenges of winter, effective maintenance management becomes a top priority. Harsh weather can significantly impact roads, bridges, and other municipal assets, leading to higher maintenance costs and safety concerns if not proactively addressed.
Citywide Route Patrol, an Enhanced Feature offered with Citywide Maintenance, delivers an innovative solution for pre-winter planning, asset monitoring and evaluation, helping municipalities strategically manage their infrastructure, identify issues in real-time, and streamline winter maintenance.
The Importance of Pre-Winter Planning and Asset Monitoring
Winter’s freeze-thaw cycles, snow accumulation, and de-icing measures can strain municipal infrastructure. Without proper preparation, small issues—such as minor cracks in roads or clogged storm drains—can escalate into significant problems like potholes or flooding.
Pre-winter monitoring helps:
- Identify Vulnerable Assets: Pinpoint roads, sidewalks, and culverts that need repair or reinforcement before winter arrives.
- Optimize Resources: Plan maintenance activities more efficiently, reducing emergency repairs during the colder months.
- Enhance Public Safety: Ensure that critical routes remain accessible and safe, even during severe weather.
Click here to learn more about preparing your municipality for the winter season.
How Route Patrol Enhances Winter Preparation
Citywide Route Patrol is a powerful software feature designed to work with Citywide Maintenance to streamline road and sidewalk inspections. It enables municipalities to maintain their infrastructure effectively while preparing for winter.
1. Real-Time Asset Monitoring
Citywide Route Patrol allows field workers to follow a designated route and track asset conditions and weather conditions in real-time via the Citywide Mobile app. Workers can quickly log issues such as debris, road cracks, or catch basin drainage problems while performing route inspections, and can even pinpoint issues on a map with their exact coordinates. Workers can also track snow fence installations pre-winter and their removal come the spring.
This real-time data, which is uploaded into Citywide Maintenance, helps municipal teams quickly identify infrastructural issues or condition concerns, allowing for more efficient work order creation and deployment of inspection and maintenance crews. This ensures any issues with critical assets like bridges, main roads, and high-traffic zones are quickly identified and repaired before the winter season.
2. Comprehensive Asset Data Management
By using Citywide Route Patrol, asset data is instantly updated in a user-friendly and centralized platform. Any updates from Citywide Route Patrol can be logged into the same cloud-based asset file, where municipalities can store inspection records, maintenance histories, and asset conditions, making it easier to assess long-term trends and plan any pre-winter maintenance ahead of schedule.
For example, if certain roads show repeated deterioration during winter, they can be flagged for preventative treatments like sealcoating or additional drainage solutions before the cold weather arrives.
3. Customizable Inspection Routes
With Citywide Route Patrol, municipalities can design specific patrol routes tailored to their infrastructure priorities and minimum maintenance standards (MMS). The software’s ability to save and auto-schedule inspection routes streamlines winter planning, ensuring consistent and efficient asset monitoring and maintenance. This automation reduces planning time and guarantees timely inspections of crucial routes, helping maintain organized and effective maintenance throughout the year.
4. Integrated Reporting and Planning
Citywide Maintenance along with Citywide Assets can generate detailed reports on asset conditions and inspection findings. These reports assist municipal leaders in making informed, data-driven decisions about prioritizing asset maintenance, determining which resources require immediate attention and which can be delayed.
The insights from Citywide Route Patrol gathered in the field allows the latest condition data to be updated in real-time, helping municipalities stay ahead of their broader Asset Management goals. This timely data also helps improve budgeting and long-term planning, allowing for better decision-making and resource allocation.
A Proactive Approach to Winter Maintenance
Preparing for winter is about more than just reacting to harsh weather conditions—it’s about being proactive. Municipalities that use Citywide Route Patrol can:
- Reduce Costs: By identifying issues and assigning work orders more proactively, municipalities can practice more preventative maintenance, which is far less expensive than emergency repairs.
- Improve Operational Efficiency: By quickly uploading asset conditions into Citywide Maintenance, which then optimizes inspections and repair schedules.
- Boost Community Confidence: By always being on top of condition issues before they are reported by citizens, demonstrating a more proactive commitment to maintaining safe, accessible infrastructure year-round.
During winter, this preparedness enables faster responses, better work coordination, and efficient resource allocation to maintain critical assets during inclement conditions.
Municipalities can also continue to use Citywide Route Patrol paired with Citywide Maintenance during the winter season to track weather conditions, snow removal, plow and sander activities and snow accumulation.
Why Citywide Route Patrol is the Best Choice for Your Municipality
Citywide Route Patrol, when combined with Citywide Maintenance, is a key element of our suite of Enterprise Asset Management tools. By enabling thorough and well-mapped inspections along various pre-defined routes, real-time data from the field can result in more efficient creation of corresponding maintenance tasks. When paired with Citywide Maintenance, Citywide Route Patrol ensures municipalities are ready to tackle winter challenges efficiently and proactively. As winter approaches, don’t face the season unprepared. Learn more about Route Patrol and how it can transform your winter maintenance strategy now.
