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But others believe that the Big-Brother elements of the
technology will have little practical effect. Harry Nespoli,
president of the Uniformed Sanitationmen's Association, which
represents 6,000 city sanitation workers, said the
satellite-tracking devices in the salt spreaders were meant to
enhance communications within the department and, in that sense,
were no different from the radios already in place.
"All it's going to do is confirm what I've been saying all along,
that we move snow," Mr. Nespoli said.
Each of the 27 salt spreaders purchased by the Sanitation
Department in December comes with a black box, which contains a
Global Positioning System receiver for picking up satellites signals
to pinpoint the spreader's location, and sensors that record air and
ground temperatures and monitor salt output.
The salt spreaders, which cost a total of $4.2 million,
automatically relay all this information to a centralized database,
which is watched closely by sanitation officials during blizzards.
In January, the system showed that two salt spreaders, in the Bronx
and in Queens, were dispensing nearly twice as much salt as was
needed. Officials radioed the drivers, and the settings were
adjusted.
"The idea is to build a better piece of equipment and be more
productive," said Commissioner John J. Doherty, who next plans to
put satellite tracking in garbage trucks.
While satellite tracking devices are hardly cutting edge - they
have long been used by hikers and boaters - the technology has been
slow to catch on in New York City because all the skyscrapers can
block or distort signals from satellites in what engineers call an
"urban canyon effect." Such problems prevented the New York City
Transit from installing satellite tracking in its buses in the late
1990's. Transit officials said this week that they have hired a
consultant to move forward with plans to place the tracking devices
in its 4,500 buses, as well as in vans used to transport the
disabled.
Gino P. Menchini, commissioner of the Department of Information
Technology and Telecommunications, said that tracking technology has
improved so much that the city is now studying a host of uses for
it, including in police cars and ambulances, and even taxis. In
addition, his department has been testing wireless
communications.
They also have been building elaborate three-dimensional maps of
the city, starting with skyscrapers and moving down to subways. The
maps will correspond to a vast bank of information, including police
precincts and building inspection records.
"I think there's more real practical business technologies
occurring now than anytime in the city's history," Mr. Menchini
said. "In general, if I had to take our mass of technology projects
and sort of put it on a scale, I'd say in regard to other large
cities, we're probably ahead of the vast majority of them."
One of the more sophisticated technology experiments is unfolding
at the Department of Environmental Protection, which deployed three
Y-shaped robots to float on the Schoharie Reservoir at a cost of
$180,000. Each robot, which is powered by solar panels, has a probe
that can be lowered into the water to take temperature and pH
readings. In addition, the probe tests for chemical and biological
pollutants as part of an early warning system for terrorist and
security threats.
In other cases, the technological improvements have sped up, and
streamlined, long-held practices. For example, the Health
Department's food service inspectors have switched over to hand-held
Acer computers for reporting findings that were once recorded on
paper forms, and then manually typed into a database - a process
that could take days and was often fraught with errors. The papers
were then preserved on microfilm at an additional cost of $100,000 a
year.
Elliott S. Marcus, an assistant health commissioner, said that
inspectors now enter their findings with a few keystrokes, and
download that directly into a database, eliminating the need for
data entry and microfilming altogether. "Instead of spending two and
a half hours on a restaurant, now we can spend two," he said.
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