Longtime boss Mayor Richard J. Daley may have dubbed Chicago as "The City That Works," but many residents of the Second City are familiar with the pains and headaches of road construction. To many, it seems like construction never ends, and some problem areas can take an excruciatingly long time to get fixed. In order to speed things up and to prevent duplicate work and conflicts, the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) has been using a Google Maps-powered application to manage construction projects for the last couple of years. In a post for the Google Geo Developers Blog, two CDOT staffers explain that the dotMaps application allows the city to coordinate public and private construction work on 30,000 different projects.
The app includes a plethora of data, including map info and images from Google Street View — a tool that many city workers were already familiar with and didn't require training for. According to Lawrence Olzsac and William Cheaks, Jr. of CDOT, the new tool helped the agency save a whopping $24 million in 2014. The funds saved are expected to pay for further infrastructure improvements. We often hear about new apps "disrupting" stodgy old industries, but city services and agencies are certainly ripe and ready for some new tech tools and big data that will bring the way the city does business up to speed.
·Chicago Department of Transportation helps build a new Chicago using Google Maps APIs [Google Geo Developers Blog]
·Chicago uses Google Maps to reduce 'conflicts between construction projects' and save $24m [Global Construction Review]
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