Historical Chicago Street Light Outage Service Requests

311 reports document one or two lights out on metal poles across Chicago's residential and arterial streets since January 1, 2011. The Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) manages these requests, updating data daily and marking duplicates within a 30-day window.

Use Cases

• Analyze service request completion times by comparing Creation Date and Completion Date columns.
• Map outage density and frequency using Latitude, Longitude, and Community Area fields.
• Identify duplicate reports within circuits using Service Request Number and Status fields marked 'Duplicate (Open)'.
• Assess geographic distribution of requests across administrative boundaries like Wards, Police District, and ZIP Codes.

Strengths

• Data spans from January 1, 2011, providing over a decade of historical records.
• Contains 22 distinct columns including precise geospatial coordinates (Latitude, Longitude) and multiple administrative boundary fields.
• Updated daily with a clear logic for handling duplicate requests within a 30-day period.

Limitations

• The dataset is historical-only and was functionally replaced by another source in December 2018, limiting its use for current analysis.
• Unknown total row count and sample size prevent assessment of statistical significance.
• Potential for geographic bias limited to the City of Chicago.

Provenance

Source

data.cityofchicago.org

Collection Method

Collected from citizen-submitted 311 service requests managed by the Chicago Department of Transportation.

Time Range

January 1, 2011 onward (historical, post-2018).

Freshness

Updated daily, but historical-only after December 2018.

Geography

City of Chicago, Illinois, USA.