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Trunk Road Gritter Tracker
- driverdan 7y agoHaving never heard the terms "trunk road" or "gritter" it took me a little time to figure out what this was. Correct me if I'm wrong but "trunk road" appears to mean something like main road and "gritter" seems to mean plow and/or sanding truck.
- squigg 7y agoThat is correct - "trunk" as in body, so the main roads are trunk roads. The vans spread rock salt (which we call grit), hence called gritters! We Scots always get confused in the states when offered grits for breakfast .... Sadly it does mean you have to look after your car in winter, as that salt does wonders for chassis rust - you have to keep the car clean!
- Symbiote 7y agoIt's a salt/sand mix, since the sand (grit) provides extra grip. If it's really cold (I assume this can happen in Scotland) it would just be grit. (I'm not sure why "gritter" would be difficult to work out. "Grit" is a normal English word: bits of grit in the cabbage, 100 grit sandpaper.)
- piinthesky 7y agoMainly rock salt but doesnt work in extreme cold as the ice freezes with the rock salt in it. Ruins the vehicle chassis in the European country's which salt their roads but it keeps the Car industry going, not to mention pollutes water courses and crops.
- alkonaut 7y agoAnd my favorite: in northern Scandinavia we try to be careful with salt because reindeer find it tasty...
- buro9 7y agoUK rock salt grit comes from here: https://www.saltassociation.co.uk/education/make-salt/rock-salt-production/ https://www.saltassociation.co.uk/education/make-salt/rock-s... The UK's biggest rock salt mine is in Winsford in Cheshire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_in_Cheshire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_in_Cheshire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winsford#Rock_salt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winsford#Rock_salt Additionally part of the mine is now used as a deep secure store for files from the health service.
- globular-toast 7y ago"Main road" is actually considerably more general than trunk road in the Great Britain. The roads in GB are ordered hierarchically starting with motorways (although these have restrictions, ie. motorvehicles only), through trunk roads, primary, secondary, all the way down to byway. It is important for navigation in GB. When you want to go somewhere you are supposed to use trunk roads to navigate to the first town/city on the trunk network beyond where you are going. The signs are coloured to indicate you are on the trunk network. Then as you approach your actual destination you will begin to see it signposted on the local non-trunk roads, at which point you leave the trunk roads. This has been mostly forgotten in this age of GPS navigation, though, and many signs are in a poor state of repair or badly occluded by trees or shrubbery.
- 70jS8h5L 7y agoI'm from the UK and was unaware of this method (trunk road to town/city after destination). Is there somewhere I can read about this in more detail? Thanks!
- globular-toast 7y agoIt used to be documented in the usage section at the beginning of road atlases.
- ivix 7y agoHere is a list of primary destinations. They are separated by region. So for example if you are in Cambridge (EAST region) you follow signs for EAST MIDLANDS. Once you are in that region, you will start seeing signs for the primary destinations in the region. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/203664/traffic-signs-manual-chapter-02-primary-route.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
- ivix 7y agoIt's really just standard manual map based navigation. A dying art these days. I haven't seen many shrubbery related problems, we still have the best signage in the world (that I've seen) and it's perfectly possible to use sign based navigation without any GPS. You however may need to ask directions for the last couple of miles in rural areas.
- BuildTheRobots 7y agoI'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"
- Denvercoder9 7y ago> I'm amazed Scotland have a real time map with also how long ago a road was gritted - much respect to them. We've the same over in the Netherlands, even including temperature of the road surface - see https://www.rijkswaterstaatstrooit.nl/ https://www.rijkswaterstaatstrooit.nl/.
- nathanm412 7y agoHere in Columbus, Ohio, we have a site called the Warrior Watch - https://warriorwatch.columbus.gov/ww https://warriorwatch.columbus.gov/ww It does a great job of showing when my street was last plowed and what it's priority is. We haven't had a lot of use for them this winter though.
- arethuza 7y agoOne thing worth noting about that map is that it's only for major roads that appear to be the responsibility of Transport Scotland - local areas have their own snow clearing coverage e.g. Here is the map (sadly without automatic updates of gritter locations) for Fife where I live: http://arcgisweb.fife.gov.uk/LocalViewEXT/Sites/publicWinterGrittting/ http://arcgisweb.fife.gov.uk/LocalViewEXT/Sites/publicWinter... Mind you - the road where I live (which to be fair is rural and up a hill) was blocked for about a week the last time we had any serious snow and it was some local farmers with JCBs who actually cleared it.
- kiddico 7y agoThis might be the first time I've seen someone else in Columbus on here! Bookmarking this for use next year. Thanks.
- 7y ago
- michelpp 7y agoG R I T A L L I C A!
- VMG 7y agoDavid Plowie!
- VectorLock 7y agoI like "SNOWBEGONE KENOBI" and "READY SPREADY GO." Also the word "gritter" is really funny to me.
- anfractuosity 7y agoNeat! I love the names too. Is it using the cell network out of interest, or..?
- CraigJPerry 7y agoYeah, i believe it’s done via the Vodafone network. Cell coverage is something like 95% of land and 99.something% of population.
- kingpiss 7y agoI 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?
- mynegation 7y agoHailing from Canada - does not look like nearly enough, probably because Scotland has relatively mild climate. The road network is very dense and branched out. Also, it takes several snow plowing machines going in formation to clean major multi lane highway. Timing is also important- you want the road cleaned as soon as possible not several days later, especially if wet snow freezes into ice.
- arethuza 7y agoAs I note in another comment - the gritters on that map are a small subset of all the gritters - those are just the ones that appear to be centrally controlled on 'major' routes. We don't get huge amounts of snow (at least not very often) - but what we do get is a combination of snow and high winds - which can make it a nightmare to keep higher roads open.
- alistairSH 7y agoDo you get icy-freeze-thaw conditions? Here in DC, we don't get a ton of snow, but when we do get winter weather, it's always just at freezing, so everything immediately gets thawed and re-frozen into ice. Most of my trips to Scotland have been summer, so only had snow up Glen Shee. The one time I visited in winter, it snowed a bit as I drove between Laggan and Dunkeld, but nothing dangerous.
- arethuza 7y ago"Glen Shee" - Scotland's version of the French Three Valleys! :-) Not sure we get any kind of weather conditions (apart from wind and rain) with any predictability!
- alistairSH 7y ago
- ejo4041 7y agoDoes 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?
- jeffrallen 7y agoSalt, rocks and lots of diesel.
- francisofascii 7y agoESRI's ArcGIS server. No, not open source.
- gbanfill 7y agoI've worked on a couple. (https://ara.grittertracker.co.uk https://ara.grittertracker.co.uk and https://manchester.grittertracker.co.uk 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.
- starkd 7y agoTook reading the comments to figure out what a gritter is. (Here in the States.)
- mirimir 7y agoHere 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.
- geerlingguy 7y agoTypically 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.
- alistairSH 7y agoThe 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.
- nkrisc 7y agoIn the Midwest (Chicago) I've usually heard them referred to as just "snowplows" or "plows", which also carried salt and spread it behind them as they plowed. Incidentally, Chicago also has a a real time plow tracker: https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/streets/supp_info/plowtracker.html https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/streets/supp_info/plow...
- multiplegeorges 7y agoToronto has the same thing for its snowplows, without the great names, sadly. They're all parked in their lots right now. We've been having unusually warm weather lately... https://www.toronto.ca/services-payments/streets-parking-transportation/road-maintenance/winter-maintenance/plowto/ https://www.toronto.ca/services-payments/streets-parking-tra...
- jvm_ 7y agoSame just down the road, but they're also service vehicles, so they're out and about regularly. http://hamilton.plowtracker.com/ http://hamilton.plowtracker.com/
- jeffrallen 7y agoICE DESTROYER!
- AndrewDucker 7y agoAm I missing something - how do you see the names? When I click on one of the vehicles I see "Vehicle Location (PN61DYG)" and the name field is blank.
- squigg 7y agoZoom in until the names appear on the map, you don't have to select each vehicle - sadly they don't all have names.
- AndrewDucker 7y agoThank you!
- AndrewDucker 7y agoHuh. Doing a search by name allows me to find some. But only the ones I've searched for by name _have_ a name. The rest have no name when I click on them. That's...weird.
- ejdyksen 7y agoIn Michigan we have webcams on the front of our snow plows, in addition to their GPS location. This is useful for seeing road conditions throughout the state in places that don't have traffic cameras. Just click the little icon that looks like a snowplow on this site. No plows out today, however... https://michigan.gov/drive/ https://michigan.gov/drive/
- cheesysam 7y agoSurely if you're planning to drive on the road, you'd want the webcam to be behind the snow plow?
- froindt 7y agoLighting behind a truck is poor (no white lights on the back), and it gives an idea of how bad the roads are getting between snow plows. This is useful since plows often run notably slower than normal traffic can safely run for the conditions.
- Xophmeister 7y agoI first misread this as "Truck road glitter tracker". At first I was disappointed, but then noticed the names of the gritting trucks and my faith in humanity was restored :)
- birdyrooster 7y ago"David Plowie" got me
- TaurenHunter 7y agoI didn't know what gritters are, but this article makes it more clear and cites some of the funny names they have. https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/gritters-in-scotland-have-names-like-gritty-gritty-bang-bang-and-you-can-track-them-on-a-map-a3741576.html https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/gritters-in-scotland-have...