Snowy Day

Think Waymo's… but for Snow Plows.

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Inspiration

It snowed. A lot.

Our streets turned into chaos, traffic slowed to a crawl, and snowplows somehow still missed half the roads. We started wondering: why are snowplow routes still basically guesswork? That curiosity turned into Snowy Day — a fun experiment to see how much better snowplowing could be with a little AI help.

What it does

Snowy Day lets you pick a city and watch snowplows clean it up the smart way.

Each snowplow acts like its own little brain, figuring out where to go next so that every road gets cleared with as little overlap and wasted time as possible. You can watch the plows move in real time as they tackle streets, highways, and intersections together.

How we built it

We built Snowy Day as a full-stack web app:

  • React.js for the frontend and map visuals

  • Python on the backend

  • A custom reinforcement learning model to plan snowplow routes

  • City roads turned into graphs using map APIs

  • WebSockets to stream live snowplow movement to the browser

In short: maps + AI + real-time visuals = satisfying snow-clearing chaos.

Challenges we ran into

  • Maps are way messier than they look

  • Teaching AI not to plow the same road twice

  • Making city-sized simulations run fast enough

  • Syncing real-time data without things exploding

  • Debugging AI that looked smart but definitely wasn’t

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Building our own reinforcement learning model from scratch

  • Watching snowplows move live on a real city map

  • Getting a full system working end-to-end at a hackathon

  • Turning a very Canadian problem into a working demo

What we learned

  • AI is only as smart as the rules you give it

  • Real-world data loves to break things

  • Real-time systems are hard, but very cool

  • Good visuals make complex ideas way easier to understand

  • Snow is a surprisingly great motivator

What's next for Snowy Day

  • Live weather and snowfall data

  • Smarter replanning when roads get blocked

  • Prioritizing emergency and high-traffic routes

  • Scaling up to bigger cities and more plows

  • Maybe even helping real cities someday 👀

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