Philly 311
The 311 system is Philadelphia's public interface to city government. Every complaint, request, and inquiry lands in a live database now queryable in real time. This track collects stories that use that data as a lens: how zip codes cluster around service patterns, which neighborhoods call in versus suffer in silence, and what the rhythm of complaints reveals about urban life.
Stories
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.