NYC 311 · 2025
3,654,988 complaints filed

Rodents in the walls. Leaks bleeding through ceilings. Noise after midnight. Sidewalks cracked into trip hazards. Heat that won't come on in January. Every grievance in the city flows into one queue.

Reach

97.98% technically reach an agency.

Not just DOT — DSNY handles sanitation, HPD takes housing complaints, DEP runs water and sewer, NYPD fields noise and illegal parking, DOB inspects buildings. Sixty-plus city agencies share the 311 load. A 311 ticket almost always gets somewhere.

But

4.25% never finish.

155,172 grievances filed in 2025 sat unresolved more than 90 days later. Officially routed. Practically frozen. The system delivers — until it doesn't.

Of that backlog
4,096 street light complaints stuck

The slice we built this tool to clear. A dark intersection isn't a quality-of-life nuisance — it's a measurable safety gap that compounds every night it stays unlit.

The tool

One tool. Sixty seconds.

1,242 NYC-licensed electricians sit within the same five boroughs. The bottleneck isn't capacity — it's how long it takes to draft a DOT-grade work order and route it to the right contractor. We compress that work from days to seconds.

Annual scope: 33,835 street-light complaints filed each year.

Step 1 of 3

Report an outage.

Sixty seconds. Address, type, photos. We'll classify, dispatch, and draft the work order.

or enter the address manually
Drag and drop photos here, or
We'll never share your information.
Step 3 of 3

Government-grade work order.

Submit the form and select a vendor to generate a work order.

Once you've selected a vendor, Claude Sonnet 4.5 drafts a DOT-format work order — pre-classified, pre-prioritized, and pre-routed — in under sixty seconds.

Assigned vendor
No vendor selected yet.
Analysis

Your complaint, in context.

Borough-level data on how 311 handles street-light complaints — submission trend, completion rates, and where this report is most likely to land in the queue.

Estimated completion time

Forecast
Days-to-close distribution for similar complaints
i Q1 / median / Q3 derived from the histogram

Volume trend · 2020–2025

Verified
Annual streetlight complaints filed in this borough
i Source: NYC OpenData erm2-nwe9

% closed within…

Verified
Borough · 2025
i Source: NYC OpenData erm2-nwe9

Distribution of close times

Verified
Borough · 2025 · highlighted = where this complaint is forecast to land
i SoQL: CASE-WHEN bucketing on date_diff_d
Why

A city that grows from within.

Clearing the 4,096 stuck tickets — and the 33,835 new street-light complaints filed every year — unlocks three compounding effects:

Revenue routed to local contractors: $0.82M – $2.05M from the 4,096 stuck tickets alone, landing in NYC-licensed electrician businesses already in the same neighborhoods as the broken lights.

Hours freed for city staff: ~16,917 hours per year of NYC DOT time recovered, redirected from drafting boilerplate to handling the cases that need engineering judgment.

Assumes ~30 min per manually-drafted work order — a stated assumption, not a measurement (no public benchmark for current municipal WO drafting time).

Higher municipal quality of life: Every closed ticket is a block lit, a stretch of sidewalk safer at midnight, a small business handed real revenue, a city employee freed to do harder work.

How it works

From complaint to crew — sequentially.

A street-light complaint passes through seven stages before a vendor is on-site. Today, four of those stages are paperwork bottlenecks taking days or weeks. Our tool collapses them to seconds.

1
Citizen submits report
instant
2
Classify complaint type & priority
~1 day < 1 sec
3
Route to the correct agency
~days instant
4
Draft DOT-format work order
~30 min < 60 sec
5
Match a verified local vendor
~days instant
6
Vendor dispatched to site
hours
7
Repair completed & logged
varies

Steps 2–5 collapse from roughly a week of paperwork into under two minutes. Steps 1, 6, and 7 are physical-world events the tool can't make faster — but it also doesn't get in their way.

A framework, not a feature

Same playbook. Every backlog.

Citizen reports → instant work-order generation → routed to a verified local vendor. The same three steps apply to every backlog 311 carries:

  • DSNY sanitation backlogs → local hauling crews
  • HPD heating, leaks, habitability → verified plumbers and HVAC techs
  • DEP water and sewer → licensed water-line contractors
  • DOB structural and facade → licensed inspectors and engineers
  • Parks maintenance → tree-care companies, fence and play-equipment vendors

Apply this beyond street lights: ~106,000 hours/year freed across DOT's full docket, ~78,000 hours of stuck work made movable across NYC's full backlog, and a framework that ports to every U.S. city operating a 311 system.

Interdependent communities compound. Every closed ticket builds the next one. Block by block, contractor by contractor, hour by recovered hour.

Built on NYC OpenData (erm2-nwe9). Every chart, every claim — Sources & methodology →