Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Technology has allowed citizen requests for city services to be streamlined with the intention of enhancing efficiencies and the ability to improve a municipality’s accountability. Citizen service requests through 311 systems are tracked and sometimes published in a city’s open data portal. These 311 data include the type of request (ranging from graffiti to complaints about homeless encampments), the geolocation of the service request, the ability to calculate the time required to resolve the request, and in some cities, the department resolving the request and the medium through which the request arrived (phone, web, mobile app, or another department).

The authors use citizen service request datasets from 20 cities, downloaded from those cities’ open data portals, to better understand how urban service delivery requests are made and to answer these research questions:

• How fast various types of service requests are resolved across these cities;
• Whether there are differences in resolution time by type of service;
• Whether there are seasonal differences in resolving service requests; and
• Whether there are differences by neighborhood in resolving similar types of service requests, indicating inequity of cities in providing their services.

Methodologies include geographic information systems, data visualization, and statistical analysis.

By using the cities’ open data portals, this research combines new and unique datasets that have not been previously analyzed in a comparative fashion across cities. Indeed, they have not been analyzed even on a case study basis. The researchers will also discuss and illustrate how the ongoing analysis of these data can help cities improve service delivery to their citizens and in doing so, will illustrate how “better data can create better decisions.”