Philadelphia
Stories drawn from OpenDataPhilly via Carto and the city's ArcGIS feature services — 311, L&I, fire, EMS, and the long-tail lookups that make a city legible.
Stories
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.
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.
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.
Philadelphia's missing shade
Philadelphia lost 5.9% of its tree canopy between 2008 and 2018. The neighborhoods that lost the most green are the same ones with the highest heat vulnerability scores — and the lowest median incomes. A scroll through the compounding geography of heat, trees, and who bears both.
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.
Where Philly burns
47% of PFD calls are false alarms. Only 14% are actual fires. And one zip — Kensington — accounts for nearly a fifth of every fire in the city. A scroll through what the Philadelphia Fire Department actually responds to since 2024.
The Narcan Map
Two readings of Philadelphia's overdose crisis: where the deaths landed in 2024, and where the Opioid Response Unit's Narcan kits went. The city's published trend tells you direction; only the raw counts tell you scale.
Stations and zips: who PFD answers to
Sixty-three stations, seven battalions, a million dispatches — and a small handful of zips that swallow most of the call load. A scroll-driven walk through the busiest places and the busiest stations, with the map's data morphing between every beat.
Medic-unit load
PFD's medic units carry roughly four EMS calls for every fire the department answers — and the geography of that load doesn't track the geography of where the medics live. Where raw volume and per-unit workload diverge.
Where shots land
Eight years of shooting victims, plotted block by block, then rolled up by police district. The pre-pandemic baseline, the 2021 peak, the partial recovery — and the three districts that absorb most of every year, regardless of trend.
The non-fire fire calls
Only 14% of PFD dispatches are actual fires. A taxonomy of the other 86% — false alarms, good intent, service calls, hazmat, weather. The operational reality behind the department's name.
EMS vs. fire, by neighborhood
Citywide PFD answers four EMS calls for every fire. Each of Philadelphia's nine broad regions tells its own version of that ratio — Center City leans medical, the river wards carry both.
The day shape of Philly crime
Six categories of PPD incidents, twenty-four hours each. Thefts spike at rush hour; aggravated assaults skew toward bar close; residential burglary tilts to daytime when residents are out. The fingerprint of each crime by hour.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Datasets
Philly 311 service requests
Live snapshot of the City of Philadelphia's 311 requests, queried directly against phl.carto.com via our Cloudflare Worker proxy. Five tabs, real SQL, real maps.
L&I Violations
License & Inspections violation notices issued to Philadelphia properties — the enforcement side of 311. Carto snapshot covering 2007 through March 2020. Join with 311 data to ask: does calling correlate with action?
Philadelphia Fire Department incidents
Every PFD dispatch since 2024-01-01 — false alarms, EMS assists, hazmat, and the ~14% that are actual fires. Quarterly updates from the city's stat360_fire_incidents layer, queried through our ArcGIS proxy.
Vacant Property Indicators
The City's three-layer view of vacancy: ~8.1k vacant buildings, ~25k vacant lots, and ~22.6k census blocks scored by vacancy percentage. The bridge from "someone called about a vacant lot" to "how much of this block is actually empty."
PHS LandCare program
Every parcel the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society LandCare program has stabilized — cleaned, fenced, planted — across Philadelphia. The cleanest public record of where vacancy intervention has actually landed, with year + season + program metadata.
L&I Complaints
Every resident-reported complaint to License & Inspections — unsafe conditions, vacant buildings, illegal use, no-heat, construction without permit. The intake-side companion to L&I Violations; each row is one phone call, not one complaint.