Author – Mary Beth Lowell – Communications Manager

Nyc_scout

Today we announced that New York City is using TeleNav Track to help clean up the city. Here’s a link to a news story and video on the program.

City inspectors drive three-wheeled scooters around the city looking for things like graffiti, potholes and garbage. When they see incidents like this, they enter it into their AT&T BlackBerry and our service marks the location using GPS. This information is then sent to the appropriate organization within the city to take care of the problems.

This use of TeleNav Track is pretty ingenious and is a great example of how GPS can be a technologically advanced solution for an age-old problem. NYC’s program (called SCOUT – short for Street Conditions Observation Unit) is the brainchild of Mayor Bloomberg but could certainly be mimicked in other cities.

Here is an interesting article I found in Reader’s Digest on the dirtiest cities in the US.

What are the top 5 you ask?

Here is the list:

  1. Portland (OR)

  2. San Jose

  3. Buffalo

  4. Columbus

  5. San Francisco

Some of this has to do with air and water quality which TeleNav Track unfortunately won’t fix but it also takes into account things like pollution and sanitation. Perhaps some of these cities can consider looking at NYC’s program as a best practice.

Kudos to NYC which is at the very bottom of this list!