Bellevue snow plows getting tech upgrades for 2025 winter season

Learned a couple things from last week’s Winter Weather Preparedness presentation at City Council (the whole meeting is on Youtube, start around 53:00):

• Apparently the transportation department was using binders and paper in their trucks for snow plow routes, and they are finally going digital with iPads and turn-by-turn directions for 2025, yay!
• You can track progress of snow plows (what’s been plowed and not) online, nice! https://bellevuewa.gov/winter-response-map.
• This year is a La Nina, and we are more likely to get wetter, colder weather. Already seeing that from the Bomb Cyclone two weeks ago and they expect more winter weather this year.
• Starting at about 57:00 they talked about the “Wind Event” aka Bomb Cyclone. Wish it had a more memorable name. Bellevue crews were working 12 hour shifts for 7 straight days, and they’re going to continue doing cleanup through early January, cleaning the streets.

Slide showing a binder that snow plow cres used to use, now they’re going digital.

Winter weather response map to see plowed roads

About this post: I live in Bellevue and I like to watch and summarize city council meetings just to know what’s going on in my city and I wanted to try sharing some of the stuff I learn with other people in Bellevue. I do use AI to help me make these summaries, but all these words above are my own. The meeting is 3 hours long so I use Google AI Studio to generate a summary with timestamps and then go through and watch the interesting bits. I’m thinking about making more posts like this to help all of us know our city better.