New York Uses 311 Data To The Max

When you’re steering a city as enormous and unwieldy as New York, you need to know every bump in the road. Perhaps more than the 911 emergency number, NYC’s sophisticated 3-1-1 call center collects relevant, real-time information, alerting city agencies of traffic hazards, sewer line breaks, illegal taxis, building permit violations and a host of other problems, all before the issues fester and become worse. The 311 system has also become the go-to, can-do agency for the city’s 8.3 million residents, providing a place to report problems and follow up on the fix, and to obtain information on thousands of topics. A story in Wired magazine now explains how the enormous amount of data collected by the 311 call center is being used by the city to handle immediate problems, but also to improve future operations. The lessons learned by handling 50,000 calls to 311 each day can be instructive to 911 centers in other cities, especially that groups of even vague calls can provide valuable information. In one example, New York City officials used hundreds of calling reporting a strange odor to pinpoint a factory in New Jersey—fielded and answered separately, no one would have been able to trace the source to a maple syrup manufacturer.