Know a Fall River Street That Needs Plowed? Head to This Website

What do you do when your community has dozens of unplowed streets? You build a website.

Matt Medeiros, a digital media developer and marketing consultant, had to navigate snow-covered streets in Fall River three days after a blizzard dumped more than 3 feet of snow on his community.

Medeiros decided something needed to be done, so he put his web-development skills to work building frplowed.cc. The website uses crowdsourced data that pinpoints for city officials and residents which streets need clearing.

According to The Herald News, the resource has received more than 11,000 votes and more than 55,000 site visits as of 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 25.

Medeiros said he was inspired to create the site after he saw former Fall River mayor Will Flanagan post on Facebook that the city needed a running list of streets that had been plowed and those that hadn't.

The site uses a list of all streets collected from Fall River's GIS map database. However, the site does not connect with city maintenance trucks or private plows. It uses crowdsourced data from users who visit the site to find the name of their street and record whether it is plowed or unplowed.

“There's a majority rule kind of thing where, if there's 100 people on a street, and 51 people say it's plowed, and 49 people say the street's not plowed, it's going to flip to a plowed street,” he told The Patriot Ledger.

Each vote has a time-stamp; users can check in to determine if and where progress has been made.

According to The Patriot Ledger, frplowed.cc has caught the attention of Fall River city officials. In fact, the Fall River Government Facebook page posted a statement asking citizens to stop reporting non-emergency plow calls to official channels and use frplowed.cc instead. 

Medeiros noted that the site doesn't send alerts to the city government. You cannot call a plow using it, and you cannot reach government officials through it.