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New site lets you map, chart Boston city service performance
By adamg on Mon, 08/24/2009 - 11:53am
The City of Boston GIS Data Hub lets you see the status of all sort of service requests to city agencies via the mayor's hotline (going back to July 1, at any rate). Cool. Hours of fun for data geeks and a potentially useful service to see how your neighborhood is doing (you can overlay wards and city-council districts), and any implications this went online only so the mayor could "wifi" his opponents who've been calling for something similar is, of course, completely reprehensible.
Only quibbles: Every time you connect, you have to agree to some long license-like thing that nobody will ever read and to get the data, you have to click the icon that looks like a cell phone next to "Mayor's Hotline" and then on "Data Query." That's kind of dumb design. On the plus side, you can export the data as Excel or a PDF.
The above shows currently open street issues (from potholes to cracked sidewalks). Here's the data in a .csv spreadsheet and as a PDF.
Via Blue Mass. Group.
Neighborhoods:
Topics:
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Comments
great, but does it show you how many tickets never get answered?
I've had to open 3 cases in the last month and none of them have been resolved- only in one case did someone actually call me. The others have been sitting for weeks.
I also really enjoyed having a hotline worker yell at me about how he was the only guy working that night and he just couldn't take down any pertinent info because, donchaknow, he just didn't have the time.
Ive only used the service
Ive only used the service once (via the internet form). I filed two requests and they were both fulfilled within a week.
I find it very interesting that the blank spots on the map appear to correspond to where the college students are. For a group of peopke that the government here is so ready to blame for everything, they sure arent calling upon the city to spend extra resources on them.
Hold that thought
The data only go back to July 1. I predict a huge number of trash complaints around, oh, Labor Day weekend in Allston/Brighton and Mission Hill.
But note thats theres no a
But note thats theres no a sinlge complaint in BU land, even though they have a very large summer program + offcampus students that stick around.
Another explanation
Unlike New York and, oh, Somerville, Boston has held steadfast in its refusal to even consider "311" as opposed to whatever number makes up "the Mayor's Hotline." How many of those students would even know whom to call about potholes, assuming they wanted to to begin with?
I feel that they, like
I feel that they, like myself, would do so via the website. 311 involves talking to someone, and we know nobody likes doing that anymore.
I do find it amusing that the website says:
If you prefer to remain anonymous please call us at the Mayor's 24 Hotline (617-635-4500)
There are a few
There are a few complaints from BU. I'm a BU student and I reported a broken traffic light that shows up on the map (intersection of Buick St and Comm Ave).
Note that this system does not use a true map-based search: the search is first performed across the entire city, then the results are truncated to the first 500 entries, *then* the results are mapped onto the current map view. So for the mapped results to be complete, your query must return fewer than 500 results citywide.
Back Bay has great italian restaurants now
Anybody but me notice that the Back Bay has taken over the North End on this map? Can't wait to eat at Giacamo's in the back bay