New solution builds on 3rd Eye route-based technology to help cities connect public works, community improvement, sanitation, housing, stormwater, and resident service needs while giving municipal teams measurable visibility into issues that affect citizens every day.

Chattanooga, TN, September 2026 – 3rd Eye®, part of Environmental Solutions (ES), and a segment of Terex Corporation, today announced the launch of Connected City™. The new solution is designed to help municipalities identify, document, prioritize, and coordinate visible community needs across departments during normal fleet operations.

Connected City gives municipal teams a shared, location-based view of conditions across the community, helping public works, community development, sanitation, housing, stormwater, code compliance, and city leadership work from the same trusted information. The system can identify sidewalk and curb conditions, stormwater concerns, debris, illegal dumping, graffiti, abandoned carts and vehicles, overgrown areas, structural damage, and other visible issues that affect public health and safety, accessibility, neighborhood appearance, resident experience, and quality of life. In practice, this type of route-based visibility can reduce the staff time required for community condition surveys by up to 97%, compressing hundreds of survey hours using traditional methods into rapid, repeatable citywide surveys.

“Improving lives begins with helping communities see and address problems before they become larger, more expensive issues,” said Pat Carroll, President of Environmental Solutions. “Connected City helps cities use the everyday coverage of collection vehicles to move from reactive service to proactive community care, with clearer priorities across every neighborhood.”

Connected City, in partnership with City Detect®, uses dedicated cameras powered by computer vision installed on existing municipal fleet vehicles, including refuse collection trucks. As vehicles complete regular routes, the system captures street-level imagery from the public right-of-way, analyzes visible community conditions, and organizes findings by location in an easy-to-use dashboard that is powered by 3rd Eye and City Detect.

Refuse collection trucks are especially well suited for this work because they travel nearly every residential street on a regular schedule. Connected City turns those routes into a consistent source of civic insight without requiring additional vehicles, inspection routes or driver actions, helping cities see more of the community without adding more burden to field teams.

The customer value is measurable. After Hurricane Helene made landfall in South Carolina, the City of Greenville used four equipped vehicles to survey 300 miles over three days and map 2,964 debris piles, helping officials document conditions and prioritize recovery efforts. In California, multiple communities are using the service to clean up graffiti, dump sites, and abandoned shopping carts and vehicles. In areas of wildfire risk, it’s being used to identify high-risk properties–those with tall dead grass and abandoned buildings–to keep those residents and their neighbors safe.

The solution is part of the Environmental Solutions Connected Collections® ecosystem, which seamlessly integrates vehicle, equipment, operator, and customer information to help fleets make better decisions, faster. It also builds on the principles behind 3rd Eye Positive Service Verification, using a passive, route-based approach that allows drivers to remain focused on safely operating their vehicles while the technology works in the background.

“Connected City gives municipalities one place to understand what is happening in the field and coordinate the departments responsible for addressing it,” said Dave Young, Chief Commercial Officer of ES. “By creating a shared operational picture, cities can prioritize work, improve responsiveness and help deliver safer neighborhoods, cleaner public spaces and a better overall quality of life for citizens.”

Connected City is designed to provide useful information while respecting residents’ privacy. Imagery is collected from the public right-of-way, faces and license plates are automatically blurred, and detections involving private property are reviewed by municipal personnel before action is taken.

Effective neighborhood services is one component of a broader community improvement strategy. By giving cities earlier visibility into community conditions that may affect public works, public health and safety, accessibility, neighborhood appearance, and resident satisfaction, Connected City helps municipal teams coordinate across departments, focus limited resources, and address concerns before they become larger service, safety, or quality-of-life issues. For residents, that means a city that can identify more problems before they are reported, provide better information, and show visible progress in the places where people live, work, and travel every day.

Planned additions include front-facing road-assessment capabilities designed to identify potholes, pavement conditions, and roadway cracking. These capabilities will provide public works departments with additional information to plan repairs, protect infrastructure investments, and address maintenance needs before they become more costly or create larger safety concerns. Preventive roadway maintenance programs can also help stretch public dollars by addressing smaller issues before they require larger rehabilitation work.

For more information about Connected City, Connected Collections, or other 3rd Eye technology solutions, visit 3rdeyecam.com.

About 3rd Eye:

3rd Eye was formed in 2001. The company provides real-time Vehicle Function/Route Performance Analytics and also uses state-of-the-art camera systems to capture and document in-cab and external events to improve the safety, reliability, and profitability of collection fleet operations. 3rd Eye is committed to ongoing innovation, engineering excellence, and impeccable business ethics. For more information about 3rd Eye, visit www.3rdeyecam.com, the 3rd Eye Facebook page, or follow us on LinkedIn.

About Environmental Solutions:

Environmental Solutions (“ES”) encompasses industry-leading brands, such as Heil®, Terex® Utilities, Terex® Services, 3rd Eye®, Soft-Pak®, Parts Central®, Marathon® Equipment, Bayne Thinline®, and The Curotto-Can® to create a premier, fully integrated equipment group serving the environmental, utilities, and transportation industries. Through extensive voice-of-customer outreach, in-house engineering and manufacturing capabilities, a wide-reaching service network, and proven industry expertise, ES is focused on solving customer problems through environmentally responsible products, innovative technology, and world-class support. For more information about Environmental Solutions, visit Terexesg.com, the ESG Facebook page, or the ESG LinkedIn page.

About City Detect:

City Detect is an AI-powered platform that helps municipalities proactively identify, manage, and mitigate urban decay and blight. Using advanced computer vision and machine learning, City Detect empowers local governments with real-time data and actionable insights to improve urban environments. The company currently operates in cities across the United States.

For more information about City Detect, visit CityDetect.com or the City Detect LinkedIn Page

City Detect® is a registered trademark of City Detect, Inc. and is used with permission