Exploring NYC 311, Part I

Urban soft systems include the social, cultural, and economic networks that are critical to the human side of cities, but are comparatively invisible compared to hard (engineered) systems. This three-part series will look at a particularly salient system for residents of NYC: the 311 reporting service.

N.B. Figures may be difficult to view and interact with on mobile.

311 is a 'hotline' that users can dial to submit service requests for government agencies to address. These agencies can then take this data and create work orders for teams to fix the problems raised. This system exists primarily in urban settings and covers non-emergency complaints such as noise, downed trees, and illegally parked cars. One can think of it as a ticketing system that the NYC government uses to receive, track, and prioritize urban issues. 311 reporting is thus a soft system that helps orchestrate the healthy function of NYC municipal services.

NYC Open Data

The goal of this series of articles is to map and identify patterns in the components that make up this system. Analyses leverage 4 sets of data from NYC Open Data:

1. 311 Service Requests from 2010 to Present: provides 311 reporting as far back as 2010, and is updated on an automated daily basis. Each record in this dataset corresponds to a 311 service request.
2. NYC Community Boards + Community Districts: provides the locations of community boards mapped as nodes in the network, as well as neighborhood boundaries.
3. Agency Service Center: provides locations of agency service centers mapped as nodes in the network.
4. 311 Service Level Agreements: describes and quantifies commitments that City Agencies have made to respond to 311 Service Requests in a timely manner.

Aggregate Volumes

We focus in this article on developing a basic understanding of the scale of operations. Since 2010, a whopping 31,942,335 service requests have flowed through 311. Brooklyn has been a relatively large contributor to this flood of requests:

Usage of the system has grown too, with 3,164,062 requests having come in 2022. This can be sliced by categorical fields such as agency_name and complaint_type:

It's clear from Figure 1 that complaints handled by each agency are mutually exclusive.

Temporal Trends and Outliers

How has the medium through which users interact with the 311 system changed over time?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, service requests submitted by a 311 call center agent on behalf of a customer (PHONE) has traditionally been the primary source of work. It makes up ~47% of all requests submitted since 2010.

Toggling the traces in Figure 2 above shows a clear dropoff in phone dominance over the last 2 years, despite growing usage of 311 overall. Users appear to instead be switching over to mobile / online usage of the 311 app. This is particularly prominent in a growth spike during Summer 2020 driven by the mobile / online mediums (more on this later).

How have the complaint types changed over time?

Residential noise complaints alone describe ~10% of requests since 2010. Over time, there have been spikes in volume for specific requests:

Figure 3 above illustrates significant periodicity present in the data:

• Heating / hot water complaints spike in winter months when demand is known to peak.
• Noise complaints (especially from the street / sidewalk) spike in summer months when city residents and traffic are relatively active.
• Complaints about street and street light conditions spike roughly every Spring as well, when roads tend to crack.

How has the volume of requests fielded by agencies changed over time?

The New York Police Department (NYPD) and Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) receive the most requests. Since 2010, their combined demand makes up almost 53% of all 311 calls.

We can see how the periodicity described above bubbles up to the agencies responsible for the complaint types as seasonal waves:

• The HPD faces most calls in winter months when heat/hot water is crucial.
• The NYPD faces most calls in summer months when residents are particularly active.

Certain agencies also fielded unprecedented surges in 311 calls in 2020 (double-click traces in the legend to isolate specific agencies). Cross referencing with complaint type and descriptors provides insight into likely driving factors, and allows us to match these peaks up to events in the COVID-19 pandemic timeline:

When are people complaining?

As expected, a large chunk of requests occur during weekday working hours (~40% Monday to Friday from 9AM - 5PM). It's also worth noting the peak that occurs on Saturday nights, when noise complaints about late night party-goers comprise almost half of all 311 service requests between 11PM - 1AM.

Next Steps

As is becoming evident in the complaint types and descriptors above, the 311 network is inherently intertwined with 'hard' systems such as:

1. the physical communications network infrastructure (mobile, internet networks) that the system leverages in order to operate.
2. the hard physical infrastructure that are the subject of service requests: transportation, water & sanitation, buildings etc.

Therefore, we may define the overall network as characterized by a set of human processes and interactions that make it 'soft', but there are also decidedly 'hard' elements that differ by geography. It makes sense then to assess whether different regions are adequately served by city agencies.

Part 2 of this series will focus more on mapping as a tool to conduct spatial analysis of the presence of agency activity across different NYC boroughs.