The Rise and Fall of New York City (311 complaints) — TIL with BigQuery
The New York City public dataset contains all the 311 complaints made since 2010. Let’s see how the city has improved — and gotten worse — over the past 6 years.
The graph below highlights the 311 complaints, with significant call volume, with the biggest increase / decrease between 2010 and 2016.
Complaints have been outpacing population growth
Since 2010 the number of complaints have grown by 18%, while the population expanded by an estimated 6%.
There’s a lot of cars in New York, and people don’t seem to know where to put them
Illegal parking, broken parking meters, blocked driveways, and derelict vehicles represent many of the highest-percentage increases. Illegal parking is the biggest offender with more than a four-fold increase.
Noise represented 18% of all 311 complaints in 2016, up from 10% in 2010. That’s an increase of over 200,000 calls — fully 2/3rds of the total increase.
We’ve previously investigated the increase in rat sightings; the increase in complaints regarding missed trash collections and dirty sidewalks might be another clue that helps explain that jump.
Graffiti and illegal postering are way down
They show a 38% and 78% reduction respectively, in line with New York City’s ongoing efforts to eradicate both.
Street repairs are failing 76% less often, and there are far fewer complaints for broken streetlights and traffic signals — down 50% on average (likely related to the city replacing halogen bulbs with LED lights.)
The graph below is a zoomed-in snapshot for every borough
We’re graphing the percentage difference of a particular boroughs complaint growth rate on the y-axis, relative to the rest of the borough’s growth rate on the x-axis. The size of each point represents the total number of calls received in 2016.
The highlighted point representing derelict vehicles in Manhattan, shows that in the other boroughs, this complaint type increased by 105% (it doubled from 17,759 to 36,416), while the Manhattan growth rate was 62% faster (a 170% increase, from 7,569 to 20,450).
It’s a fun graph to play with (you should make a copy of the sheet and investigate it yourself), but it’s pretty hard to interpret, so let’s pull out some notable observations for each borough.
The following chart breaks the complaints into four quadrants
Those on the right represent complaints that have increased, and on the left where they’ve decreased.
The upper half represents complaint-types that are worse in one borough than the others, and the lower half, shows where they’re better.
Values less than -100% in the upper left (colored red) represent complaint types that have increased in one borough while decreasing in the other boroughs, while values under -100% (green) in the lower right indicate complaint types where calls have decreased in one borough, despite increasing elsewhere.
So here for Brooklyn, complaints about illegal building conversions, street cave-ins, and graffiti have increased, while dropping in the other boroughs. Rough, pitted, and cracked roads complaints in Brooklyn have dropped at more than twice the rate at which they increased in the other boroughs.
Street-light complaints are improving twice as quickly in Brooklyn than elsewhere, but derelict vehicles complaints are growing 62% faster than the other boroughs.
You can see the exceptional complaint types for the other boroughs in the charts below.
I’ve cherry picked the ones I thought most notable or interesting
There are thousands of individual complaint types and descriptors, so the graphs and lists I’ve used in this blog post aren’t comprehensive
The complaint types and descriptors have also changed over the years, so a comparison required some reconciliation to account for renamed, deprecated, and newly introduced complaint types.
Note also that we’re measuring the change in the number of complaints. More complaints are correlated with more problems, but it’s possible that people are just complaining more, or that awareness of the 311 service has been increasing.
Run some queries to investigate the changes in more detail
There’s a lot more New York City open data to be explored for trends and changes. Everything from Citibike and taxi rides, to motor vehicle accidents. Check it out yourself, and share your findings.
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