Chicago tracks fleet vehicles on Web-based maps
Chicago has built a citywide vehicle-tracking network that allows certain department heads and supervisors to see the locations of all their vehicles at any time of the day or night. The Multi-Agency Government Integrated Communications Network (MAGIC) is a wireless network that connects geographic positioning system (GPS) devices with geographic information system (GIS) technology to improve the accountability and efficiency of fleet vehicles in the city.
Chicago’s 40 departments own 7,300 vehicles, including snow plows, sanitation trucks and construction machinery. A few years ago, several departments were working independently to create wireless networks that could be used to track vehicles and to communicate with employees in the field. In 2001, Mayor Richard Daley directed city departments to work together to create a single wireless system for all departments. The Fleet Management Department and Business and Information Services (BIS) took the lead in developing the network.
The city contracted with Raleigh, N.C.-based Imagine This to evaluate the system requirements of every department. Following the evaluation, the MAGIC development team decided to start using the wireless network to track snow plows during the winter. The city contracted with Addison, Ill.-based Products Research to install GPS units on 350 snow plows and to create a database to store its data. The GPS units used wireless service from New York-based Verizon to send information to the databases, which appears as maps from the company.
The Streets and Sanitation Department, which operates the snow plows, went live on MAGIC on Dec. 1, 2001. Using the new system, snow plow supervisors could view maps of the city and see where each plow was located as well as a two-minute history of its path. “For the very first time, we had the ability to see at any point in time what any of the city’s equipment was doing,” says Scott Stocking, GIS technical manager for BIS.
In May 2002, the city contracted with Madison, Wis.-based GeoAnalytics to change the mapping application to a Web-based viewer by Redlands, Calif.-based ESRI. Using the viewer, city officials can choose any map from the city’s GIS repository — including maps of street centerlines, ward boundaries and buildings — to overlay with the locations of vehicles. Supervisors can log into MAGIC to view their vehicle locations from any computer with a Web browser connected to the city’s intranet. The mapping conversion was completed in November 2002, and since that time, nearly 500 vehicles in the Fleet Management, Streets and Sanitation, and the Department of Transportation have been added to the network.
MAGIC has helped Chicago improve the accountability of its fleet because each vehicle’s path is recorded in the database. “We’ve had instances where somebody will say, ‘This truck was at such and such a place, and it nearly hit me,’” Stocking says. “We can tell whether the truck was there or not, what direction it was going and how fast it was going.”
MAGIC cost $2 million to develop. The city plans to add more vehicles from the Department of Water and the Revenue Department to the network this year.
