Methodology & Sources

What is 311info?

311info compiles raw 311 service request counts from 24cities across the US and Canada. Each city page shows total requests, monthly trends, and per-category breakdowns sourced directly from that city’s open data portal.

What is 311?

311 is the non-emergency service request system most North American cities use for things like potholes, noise complaints, illegal parking, sanitation, and graffiti. Residents file requests by phone, app, or web form. Each request becomes a row in a public dataset with a category, a location, and a creation timestamp.

Where does the data come from?

Every number on this site is derived from each city’s official open data portal. We pull the full 311 request feed, normalize fields across platforms (Socrata, ArcGIS, CKAN, Carto, OpenDataSoft), and load the raw records into our warehouse. No third-party aggregators, no extrapolation — just the raw city data. Each city page links to the underlying dataset on the city’s portal.

How often is the data updated?

Bronze ingestion runs on the 2nd of each month for the previous calendar month, so most cities have data through the most recent complete month. Each city page shows its exact data coverage window, and the “Data through” stamp in each page header reflects the freshest record in the current build.

How are counts computed?

Every count on this site is a simple row count over a filter:

• Total requests is the count of every 311 row the city has published in our coverage window.
• Monthly volume groups those rows by the month the request was created in the city’s local time.
• Per-category counts use a hand-curated mapping from each city’s raw service-type string to a normalized cross-city category (e.g. noise, potholes_roads, sanitation, graffiti). Rows whose raw type doesn’t match any known category fall into other.
• Resolution time and closure rate only appear on pages where we’re confident in the sample — specifically, where at least 5,000 requests have a real closed-date timestamp AND at least 50% of the city’s rows include resolution data. Cities that don’t publish reliable close-dates get their resolution metrics hidden rather than shown with a made-up number.

How do I cite 311info?

Suggested citation format for articles and research:

311info, "[City Name] 311 Requests by the Numbers," data through April 2026,
derived from [City]'s open 311 service request data.
https://fishydatadev.click/city/[source_id]/

Each city page also links to the underlying dataset on the city’s portal, so you can cite the primary source directly if you prefer.

Cities currently tracked

24 cities, alphabetical: