311 for Whom?
NYC 311 is a local authority that provides citizens with access to New York City government services by filing complaints through Call Center, Social Media, Mobile App, Text, Video Relay Service, and TTY/text telephone as claimed on its official website.
It’s particularly interesting to see for whom this communication platform is built and how does reflect on the data. So here I did an analysis of the existing data to see and interpret the pattern, both spatial-wise and time-wise. The dataset used here is NYC 311 service requests from 2010 to present owned by NYC Open Data.
How do citizens access the platform? They call in.
First thing first, to see whom 311 is for, who are actually using 311 complaints and how do they access the platform are investigated. It’s quite interesting to see how people typically file a 311 complaint. From NYC 311 complaints data in 2017, the breakdown percentage of channel usage differs largely between groups.
The majority of the complaints come from three channels if we put Unknown channel aside: Phone, Online, and Mobile, with over 50 percent of people filed complaints by phone. The channel usage rank remains the same within the top three agencies that receive the most complaints. However, interestingly, for the Department of Transportation, complaints channels are mostly unknown for some reason — needs further investigation.
To have a better understanding of the seasonal change of 311 complaints by channel types, here’s a plot of monthly 311 service requests in 2017 with channel type breakdowns. The peak of the complaints happened in June and December, it may worth investigation into what kind of complaints people are having. My guess here is that there’s some temperature or season-related issues or services being filed on.
Phone complaints are pretty dominant among all types, so the trend of total complaints also traces that of the phone complaints while other channel types also add to the peak values.
Besides the change in time, spatial distribution is also interesting to investigate. Thus here I also plotted the spatial distribution for the 311 complaints based on channel types.
These maps give us an overall view of where the complaints are most as well as how people are submitting service requests. There are, significantly, more complaints clustered in Manhattan, but for different types of channels, the pattern remains consistent.
All boroughs share pretty much the same pattern of channel usage.
As the chart below shows, the pattern of channel usage is pretty much the same for all boroughs with some variance in the total amount of complaints.
If you use your smart device in almost all daily life activities, you may have the same question as I do when I’m seeing this result of channel usage. It doesn’t seem to match with the daily observation of people on their phones. In fact, NYC 311 has called for mobile channels but it doesn’t seem to apply on all.
One question just popped up in my head when I’m seeing there’re more complaints by phone over by mobile: Where is the internet available?
So I plot out the complaints filed via mobile and wifi hotspot to see if there’s any similar pattern observed. It turns out that the complaints do cover all the areas with high wifi density. But with a huge amount of complaints, it’s hard to observe any pattern in detail.
On the other hand, I also plot out the complaints filed via phone and wifi hotspot to see if I can find anything. The result shows that Brooklyn and Bronx have less access to the public wifi hotspots have a quite high amount of complaints by phone. Again, it’s still too early to say anything about the channel type versus wifi hotspots since the complaints are all over the place.
It makes sense when people are using mobile more often when they are in the range of wifi hotspots, but why are people still calling when it seems easier to use a mobile app for filing complaints?
People’s complaint habits may worth thinking about. For example, if people feel more comfortable and more guaranteed when they call for a service request. Age groups can also be a potential reason if more technology adapted people are not requesting any services.
So from there I’m trying to figure out if there’s any difference and try to think about what are the missing pieces by analyzing the elderly population and how they use the tool. Is there any availability and accessibility issue being observed?
Here I took people over age 65 as the elderly to see if there’s any relationship between the elderly population percentage and the number of complaints by different channel types. The middle line represents NYC’s average aged population percentage.
No obvious trend or relationship is found here. However, from the graph, we can see a number decrease in complaints about the boroughs with a more aged population than the city average. There might be other factors causing this vague trend too, such as population density.
A more detailed study needs to be conducted in order to make any conclusion, either for smaller age groups or for smaller geographical areas can be useful to determine any trend further.
But NYC 311 may want to look at their availability for anyone or to promote its platform or channels, especially its mobile channel for more accurate and valuable service requests.
Data Source:
NYC OpenData. (2020). 311 Service Requests from 2010 to Present [Dataset]. Retrieved from https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Social-Services/311-Service-Requests-from-2010-to-Present/erm2-nwe9
NYC OpenData. (2020). NYC Wi-Fi Hotspot Locations [Dataset]. Retrieved from https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Social-Services/NYC-Wi-Fi-Hotspot-Locations/a9we-mtpn
NYC OpenData. (2020). Projected Population 2010–2040 — Total By Age Groups [Dataset]. Retrieved from https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/projected-population-2010-2040-total-by-age-groups-1f46d