Visualizing 213,209 Nonemergency Calls

A study of all 311 calls that Bostonians did during 2015

By Fu Xiangyi and Irene de la Torre-Arenas | April 2016

Data Visualization Workshop (Spring2016). Mentored by Siqi Zhu. | Northeastern University

Considering that the 311 number is a service provided by the City of Boston to make inquiries and non-urgent concerns, the types and numbers of complaints can be a good representation of how a neighborhood is or what types of problems might appear there. But one can go further and try to see if all calls are treated in the same way, or if it takes the same amount of time to close a case in one place or another and re-do the question to "are all neighborhoods in Boston treated equally?".

Location of the calls

The average time to do so amounted to 10 days, having cases of calls that were not solved within the following 50 days or even 300 days (there are cases in the database with no closing date after the end of the year). The neighborhood with more problems of this kind was East Boston, with an average time of 12 days.

Number of calls per week The scale of the graphs changes when all types of calls are shown, or when 'Request for Snow Plowing' or 'Missed Trash/Recycling/Yard Waste/Bulk Item' are selected, due to vast number of number of complains filed by extending the axis.

Each bar represents the number of calls done during a week. Brush over them to know their location in that specific time range

Calls resolved...

5,6% of the calls were solved within one hour

Almost 32% of all the cases were closed in one day

The mean time to close a case was 10 days

Almost 1 out of 10 cases (9,6%)

More than 17,000 calls (8,0%)

Only 17 calls remained open more than a year.

How long does it take to close a 311 case?

Explore how long it takes to the City of Boston to close a case depending on the neighborhood.

In days

Do the calls change from neighborhood to neighborhood?

Explore which types of calls had each neighborhood and when. Hover over the diagrams to know the how many calls from each neighborhood there were each week last year.