NYC Noise – 2010 to 2017: distribution of complaints by time of day.

Going by the time of day people are filing complaints about noise, the quietest time of the day is from 5AM to 7AM with the peak being around 11PM and midnight. Since large numbers of New Yorkers belong to the “oh yeah?” tribe, I guess it’s now going to get noisier around 6 in the morning? Here’s hoping not.

This is data aggregated for the years 2010 to 2017. Data from 2004 to 2009 does not include the specific time when the complaint was filed.

I’d be curious to see how the city’s human resources are distributed over the 24 hour period.  Safe to assume they lean more towards business hours?  To quote a famous walk-back: I don’t see why it wouldn’t be.

When I started this blog (also its raison d’etre), the construction noise from Brookfield Place in Battery Park City started late in the evening and went on into the early hours. That is, it followed the pattern in the graph above. Going by noise in my neck of the woods these days (mostly still attributable to Brookfield), I’d say the nuisance noise follows a different pattern and peaks in the evenings on weekdays. Also, it’s mostly not construction-related any more. So what are the top three types of noise around the city and how do they peak and trough over the day?

1:     Noise – Residential           1,357,147
2:     Noise                                   362,523
3:     Noise – Street/Sidewalk      300,657

What’s in the catch-all at number 2? Anybody’s guess. But here’s how they span the day – only the cryptic “Noise” category differs noticeably, peaking once at 9am and again at 10pm:

311 data from NYC Open Data downloaded at various times. As of Feb 5, 2018, 27 million rows, 52 variables till 2009, 53 variables from 2010. Parsed using R v3.4.3 in RStudio v1..1.423