Historical Chicago Street Light Outage Service Requests

Approximately 250,000 street lights are overseen by the Chicago Department of Transportation. This historical dataset contains all open and completed 311 service requests for 'Street Lights - All Out' outages, which involve 3 or more lights, reported since January 1, 2011. Data is updated daily by the City of Chicago.

Use Cases

• Analyze spatial patterns of outages using Latitude, Longitude, and Community Area to identify high-need neighborhoods.
• Model repair completion times by analyzing the time delta between Creation Date and Completion Date.
• Identify duplicate request patterns by filtering on Status fields like 'Duplicate (Open)' and 'Duplicate (Closed)'.
• Correlate outage reports with administrative boundaries such as Ward, Police District, and Census Tracts for jurisdictional analysis.

Strengths

• Data covers service requests reported since January 1, 2011, providing a long-term historical view.
• Includes precise geospatial coordinates (Latitude, Longitude, X Coordinate, Y Coordinate) for location-based analysis.
• Contains over 20 columns detailing request metadata, status, location, and administrative geography.

Limitations

• The dataset is marked as historical-only and its function was replaced by another dataset, indicating it may not receive new updates.
• Sample size and total row count are unknown, making it difficult to assess data volume.
• Potential for duplicate records exists due to the described 'Duplicate' status handling logic.

Provenance

Source

City of Chicago via data.cityofchicago.org

Collection Method

Service requests submitted to the city's 311 system and managed by the Chicago Department of Transportation.

Time Range

From January 1, 2011 onward.

Freshness

Updated daily, but dataset is historical-only and functionally replaced.

Geography

City of Chicago, Illinois, USA.