data . willkara
scroll · 2026-05-13 · ~6 min · live data

Pandemic 311

Six categories of Philadelphia 311 calls, stacked month by month from 2019-01 to 2024-12. The shape of the city's complaints didn't return to normal — it just settled at a new normal.

Before the pandemic, Philly's 311 categories had shapes you could draw from memory. Trash collection peaked in summer. Pothole reports peaked in spring. Abandoned-vehicle filings and street-light outages ticked along at low, steady rates. The chart on the right plots all six together, stacked from baseline up.

We're frozen on June 2019 — a representative pre-pandemic month. The bands look stable because they were stable.

Then March 2020. Philadelphia issued its first stay-at-home order on March 23rd. By the end of the month, parts of the 311 stack had collapsed.

Maintenance Residential or Commercial fell -57% between February and March 2020. With residents off the streets and city enforcement reduced, the categories that needed someone-else-to-notice simply stopped being filed.

Summer 2020 was the inverse story. As the city reopened in halting phases, the categories that spike when people *are* outside started catching up — and overtook themselves.

Rubbish/Recyclable Material Collection peaked at 9,643 reports in 2020-07 — 6.0× its January 2019 baseline. The reopening didn't return Philly to 2019; it produced a new, louder version of summer.

By late 2020 the trash backlog had its own storyline. Sanitation crews — short-staffed through summer, then drowning in residential waste from a city that had collectively moved indoors — couldn't keep pace. Missed-collection complaints stacked higher than at any point in the previous decade.

Rubbish/Recyclable Material Collection peaked at 9,643 reports in 2020-07. That band, the lighter one in the middle of the stack, is the visual signature of an infrastructure that buckled and never quite caught up.

Skip ahead to mid-2024. The bands have settled — but they haven't returned to where they started. Some categories run hotter than 2019; some run cooler. The proportions shifted and stuck.

That's the lasting fingerprint of the pandemic on a 311 system. Not a discrete event in the timeline, but a permanent change in the ratio of what residents call about. Each band in the stream tells its own version of that story.

  1. Maintenance Residential or Commercial
  2. Rubbish/Recyclable Material Collection
  3. Abandoned Vehicle
  4. Illegal Dumping
  5. Pothole Repair
  6. Street Light Outage
View underlying data

Monthly counts per category — same numbers the stacked stream renders. Scroll horizontally on small viewports.

MonthMaintenance Residential or CommercialRubbish/Recyclable Material CollectionAbandoned VehicleIllegal DumpingPothole RepairStreet Light Outage
2019-011,3571,6081,9861,89601,422
2019-021,3281,5281,9161,64701,188
2019-031,5141,7262,0371,96901,061
2019-041,9602,5742,3912,4860990
2019-053,0834,2272,2902,52901,047
2019-063,3664,2362,1722,62401,246
2019-073,7663,5892,1392,82801,728
2019-083,5954,3312,3323,13101,484
2019-092,7262,7932,3262,84701,200
2019-101,8632,8332,1512,53701,209
2019-111,1902,1761,5761,90801,147
2019-121,2083,3381,6441,78001,134
2020-011,4442,7292,2852,41201,372
2020-021,3642,0722,0112,18601,289
2020-035822,4381,6201,9880947
2020-0405,7889191,8180720
2020-0506,5741,3302,4250916
2020-0606,4991,6992,54301,556
2020-0709,6432,2322,42801,503
2020-0804,3052,5512,22901,351
2020-0901,7072,9592,60401,018
2020-1001,3362,5272,0060834
2020-1101,7172,1931,70801,051
2020-1202,7642,0661,72601,081
2021-0102,7122,4212,17801,215
2021-0205,0291,7181,0060745
2021-0302,1643,2712,24101,193
2021-0402,2483,1232,3240834
2021-0502,5652,9442,2100850
2021-0605,7693,1872,22301,193
2021-0702,7152,9512,60001,796
2021-0802,5933,0402,63602,532
2021-0902,4352,9672,33403,185
2021-1002,2902,7872,14003,113
2021-1102,3282,0351,78403,037
2021-1202,0972,0831,69902,213
2022-0101,7972,1011,46302,639
2022-0201,8592,2271,67602,407
2022-0302,1383,0052,11202,618
2022-0401,9212,6281,79201,635
2022-0502,2552,5992,06701,602
2022-0602,6302,9622,45601,777
2022-0702,7962,5362,64101,956
2022-0803,0742,6812,79502,007
2022-0902,4742,4352,23901,539
2022-1002,1052,1221,87301,092
2022-1101,9421,9191,49201,240
2022-1202,0361,9981,42401,213
2023-0101,8092,7711,85101,198
2023-0201,6942,4641,4520964
2023-0301,9083,2381,83101,157
2023-0401,8542,8781,6360965
2023-0502,0752,9232,04501,071
2023-0602,4682,4661,98901,018
2023-0703,1992,4882,50601,397
2023-0803,8923,0912,45301,250
2023-0902,8222,3621,95601,019
2023-1002,1332,5561,8440918
2023-1101,8752,0971,56501,002
2023-1201,8191,7971,4720902
2024-0103,2842,2801,55101,142
2024-0201,7842,7191,59301,021
2024-0301,8902,8291,7160841
2024-0402,8583,5401,85501,305
2024-0502,3343,5851,9120871
2024-0602,4003,0292,1000906
2024-0702,9192,9492,33001,094
2024-0802,5743,1782,4960897
2024-0901,9392,8412,0230606
2024-1001,9192,5781,8740935
2024-1101,6452,0321,4150842
2024-1202,4861,7931,3070789

Data Sources

Primary dataset: Philadelphia 311 service-and-information requests (public_cases_fc) via phl.carto.com. 72 months × 6 categories, frozen at deploy (2026-05-13).

Queries: topCategoriesByMonthSql(months, TRACKED_CATEGORIES) — a single Carto round-trip across 2019-01 → 2024-12 for the six tracked categories (Maintenance Residential or Commercial, Rubbish/Recyclable Material Collection, Abandoned Vehicle, Illegal Dumping, Pothole Repair, Street Light Outage). Defined in src/lib/data/datasets/philly-311.ts.

Methodology & caveats: Lockdown-collapse and peak figures in the prose come from the same monthly counts: lockdownDelta compares Feb 2020 → Mar 2020 per category; peakByCategory picks each category's max-count month within the window. Chart: LayerCake + d3-shape stacked stream, hand-themed against the data-zine palette. Band ordering is fixed by the TRACKED_CATEGORIES constant so the legend stays stable across the scroll; opacity is the only thing that changes per beat.