What does it take to keep an entire city on the move? How many vehicles does it take to provide police cruisers, firetrucks, utility trucks, garbage trucks, street sweepers, beach combers, lawn mowers, snow plows, and plain old cars to serve all the residents of the Mermaid City?

How many objects with wheels or engines does the city operate across more than 30 departments with more than 5,000 employees serving nearly 250,000 residents?

4? 40? 400? 

All told, the City's Fleet includes more than 2,000 "assets": cars, trucks, and equipment such as tractors and excavators that allow Team Norfolk members from police officers and firefighters to forest rangers and landscape crews to refuse collectors to keep our city safe, beautiful and clean. 

These vehicles allow city staff from service divisions such as Planning, Neighborhood Development, the Community Services Board and Human Services to reach residents in their neighborhoods.

From filling potholes to digging up water lines to creating a cemetery plot, the city deploys multiple types of specialized equipment.

And now, information on all these assets lives here in Norfolk Open Data.

Fleet maintains the hundreds of vehicles in its care. With 29 technicians in the city's shop on Lance Road, that means each is responsible for about 71 assets: oil and belt changes, new tires and rotations, brake pad replacement, state inspections, plus all of the usual repairs due to use as well as damage. 

Keep in mind that many of the city's vehicles are in 24/7/365 use: police and fire vehicles, garbage trucks, and street sweepers for example. Heavy daily use requires significant upkeep due to wear and tear. Others take a lot of abuse by their very design: the city's beach comber rakes trash out of miles of sand each day in the summer. Fleet also cares for city vehicles damaged while on the road:  a firetruck was rear-ended and sustained $56,000 worth of damage. To ensure uninterrupted service to residents, especially for Public Works vehicles, Fleet works around the clock, too, repairing vehicles overnight that need to be on the road in the morning.  

The technicians in this shop also maintain small engines and motors, and work on specialized equipment including golf-style carts modified for use in parking garages, beach and street sweepers.

All told, technicians completed 9,504 work orders in Fiscal Year 2020.

The data presented here helps Fleet to track: 

Each of the dots in the chart above represents the total lifetime costs of a vehicle in the city's fleet -- purchase price plus maintenance. As you might expect, the most expensive vehicles are among the most expensive to maintain. Norfolk Fire-Rescue's ladder trucks, for example, are the dots in the extreme right portion of the graph.

Most vehicles in the city's fleet have lifetime costs under $50,000 -- that's the largest cluster of dots in the lower left corner.

The city's average vehicle cost is $56,361, and average life-to-date maintenance costs are $22,808, for a total average cost of $78,186. Averages include both the city's least and most expensive vehicles. 

The median cost is much, much less. Park all the city's vehicles in a long, long line arranged in order of expense and sit on the hood of the one in the middle. Its value is $32,621 for lifetime purchase and maintenance cost.

The city's Fleet ranges from trucks filled with ice cream to vans filled with stray dogs and cats, from motorcycles to refuse trucks decked out for the holidays. Next time you see a street sweeper or a refuse collection truck in your neighborhood, imagine a long line of men and women standing behind it, tools in hand, ready to keep it rolling in good repair.

We leave you with one more image, a compilation by Norfolk Police Department of its service vehicles through the years. Check out the fins in that second row!