The following comes from Council Member Rory Lancman: “In a truly cruel technological twist, the City's online, real-time snowplow tracker, PlowNYC, showed many streets as having been recently plowed when clearly they hadn't been. Really, what inspires greater confidence in your government than standing atop a snow mound in the middle of an unplowed street and looking at an app telling you that the street was plowed a few hours ago? This is just one manifestation of the City's failure to fulfil one of its most basic responsibilities, but in the investigatory hearing to come (and boy does there need to be an investigatory hearing), we need to explore if PlowNYC's detached optimism was as much cause as symptom. For example, was the City relying on PlowNYC's flawed data to make decisions about where to deploy resources, diverting snowplows from streets that it mistakenly believed were already plowed?” The issues we had with unplowed snow in the area also seem to be due to a new “sectoring” strategy by Sanitation instead of the previous ranking of streets as primary, secondary and tertiary. And the cherry on top was the non-renewal of the contract with a private company that previously helped with snow removal.