The Town of Paradise snowplow fleet is now tracked alongside St. John's, Mount Pearl, and the Provincial fleet.
Someone lovely from the City of reached out and explained what had happened with the plow tracking service.
While the service was down, I built a distributed agent system so volunteers could help keep the data flowing by running a small Go binary that fetched plow data from their systems.
ECDSA signature verification / admin panel / scheduling coordinator / multi-platform system service configuration - roughly 6,300 lines of code across Go, Python, HTML/CSS/JS, tests, CI pipelines, and docs.
Thankfully, all of that can now be removed. The plow tracker is back to talking directly to the city's AVL server, the way it was always meant to work.
Coverage playback and the heatmap view are now powered by deck.gl, a GPU-accelerated visualization library. Time-lapse playback is noticeably smoother — the map no longer rebuilds thousands of line segments every frame, it just tells the GPU what time it is. Coverage lines now have rounded caps and a fade trail. Most importantly, playback now works with all sources enabled instead of requiring you to select a single source first.
The St. John's data source is currently experiencing technical difficulties on the city's end. To make situations like this visible, the map now shows an orange warning icon next to any source that hasn't received fresh data in a while. Hovering over it tells you how long it's been. Vehicles that haven't reported a position recently are also hidden from the realtime view so the map only shows what's actually moving.
A "Support me on Ko-fi" button now appears in the sidebar, if you'd like to help keep the servers running.
The map now tracks plows from Mount Pearl and the Provincial fleet alongside St. John's. Toggle sources on and off from the legend, or zoom into a specific city. Coverage playback is significantly faster.
You can now search for a street address and jump directly to it on the map, instead of scrolling and zooming manually.
Contributors: @blossom2016 View changes
New welcome modal with information about the project and an email signup form. Leave your email to get notified when street-level plow alerts are ready. Social sharing images and SEO metadata added.
Play back coverage data as a time-lapse animation. Filter by vehicle type using the legend checkboxes. Follow a specific vehicle during playback. Improved time range slider and mobile layout.
Collapsible legend showing vehicle types with color coding. "Locate me" button to center the map on your position.
Contributors: @AminTaheri23 View changes
View which streets have been plowed over the last 6, 12, or 24 hours. Switch between route lines and a heatmap view. Pick a specific date to review past coverage. Time slider to scrub through the window.
Live map of St. John's snowplow fleet. Vehicles update every 6 seconds from the City of St. John's AVL system. Click any vehicle to see its recent trail. Data is stored for historical playback.