Noise by quarter, NYC Council District 2
Noise complaints to 311 from NYC Council District 2, aggregated by quarter.
From the first full quarter after Councilmember Carlina Rivera’s election in 2017, to the most recent quarter. District 2 covers the Manhattan neighborhoods of East Village, Gramercy Park, Kips Bay, Lower East Side, Murray Hill, Rose Hill.
311 data from NYC Open Data downloaded at various times. Parsed in RStudio v1.1.453 on R v3.3.3
The City Council has taken notice. In November, Margaret Chin, a councilmember from lower Manhattan, introduced a bill that would require the Department of Environmental Protection to start sampling noise across the city. The bill notes that “noise pollution is widely prevalent in urban areas” and that “transportation systems are the main source”—though it adds that bulldozers, air compressors, loaders, dump trucks, jackhammers, pavement breakers, loudspeakers, plumbing, boilers, air-conditioners, fans, and vacuum cleaners also bear considerable blame. As a data scientist, I will be delighted to have data, one day, on decibel levels across the city. In the meantime, the information from those hundred and forty thousand 311 calls, which is available on the city’s OpenData portal, provides an immensely rich view of New York’s soundscape. I decided to dig in, to gain a more quantitative understanding of where our noise is coming from.