Philly 311 service requests

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The vacant block effect

Philadelphia has roughly 8,000 vacant buildings on the city's books and 12,000 parcels stabilized by the PHS LandCare program. They don't sit in the same places — and the 311 dumping and graffiti calls reveal whose blocks the gap leaves behind.

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Philadelphia's pothole season

Philadelphia's 311 system files potholes and pavement failures as 'Street Defect' — 167,000 reports and counting. They cluster along high-traffic corridors, spike every late winter as freeze-thaw cycles break the asphalt, and almost always get reported during the morning commute.

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Riding the pothole

Most maps show where the street is broken. We wanted to show what the bus rider sees from the platform — and which of SEPTA's ~10,000 Philadelphia stops sit in the middle of the city's heaviest 311 street defect and lighting load.

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The Anatomy of Neglect

Illegal dumping, property violations, and blight complaints don't spread evenly across Philadelphia. They compound, almost exclusively, in the exact same neighborhoods. A scroll-driven look at how civic failure stacks.

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Mapping Philadelphia's illegal-dumping hot spots

In 2024, residents filed thousands of illegal-dumping reports across the city. 19134 alone accounts for nearly a quarter of all reports—and the day-of-week pattern reveals when dumping peaks.

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Does calling 311 actually work?

Philadelphia's 311 closure rates vary wildly by category — and response times across the city's zip codes are anything but equal. The data behind the inequity.

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You called 311. Then what?

Property and blight complaints land at 311; violation notices come from L&I. Where do those two records line up across the city, and where do they diverge? A zip-by-zip co-occurrence map.

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A day in the life of Philadelphia, by 311 call

From the predawn lull to late-night maintenance complaints, every kind of trouble has its hour. The city's 24-hour rhythm in 311 calls — plus the weekly heatmap and how five holidays show up in the data.

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The seasonal city

Two categories define Philadelphia's 311 winter — Salting and Shoveling, both literally 100% winter. Almost everything else peaks in summer. The seasonal flip, ranked.

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Trash in transit

Two waste-related 311 categories — illegal dumping and missed rubbish/recyclable collection — leave very different fingerprints on the map. A two-layer hex-bin view of where they overlap and where they don't.

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The 1 in 10 zip codes

Eight zip codes — out of 48 — drove most of Philly's 2024 illegal-dumping reports. A scroll-driven walk from the citywide map down to one zip's day-of-week fingerprint, contrasted against the median.

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Pandemic 311

Six categories of Philly 311 calls, stacked month by month from 2019 through 2024. The shape of the city's complaints didn't return to normal — it just settled at a new normal.

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When the city sleeps

Different parts of Philly call about different things at 2 AM. A scroll-driven flyover of four neighborhoods and their 24-hour 311 fingerprints.