It was around 2010 when a group of maintenance and snowplow drivers from the Idaho Transportation Dept. came to the agency’s director, Brian Ness, and other executives with a proposal to change winter scheduling. Rather than establish upfront the number of crews for specific times of the week, they would coordinate twice a week with the National Weather Service about predicted storms and change staffing accordingly. That would put more plows on the road only when they were needed, and workers could take days off at different times throughout the week.
“Before that change, we had about 28% of our roads clear of ice and snow during a storm. Now we are at about 86% to 97% because we have more people out there when we need them,” Ness says. “They could see the system that had been in place before was not very efficient, and they came up with a way to fix it.”