About
chiwardboard ranks Chicago’s 50 wards by how fast the city closes 311 service requests filed in them - towing an abandoned car, filling a pothole, baiting an alley. The records are public. The comparison, somehow, was not. Now it is.
We take the record seriously as data and refuse to take its language seriously. “Aggressive rodent mitigation response protocol” is not a sentence a neighbor says; “rat complaint” is. The official term is always one hover away, so anyone can check our work against the source.
The joke, where there is one, is the process - never the people in it. A ward superintendent should be able to send this page to a colleague.
Methodology
- Source. The City of Chicago’s public 311 Service Requests dataset and the city’s 2023 ward boundaries. Numbers are computed from the rows themselves at build time and published as a dated snapshot; the exact snapshot behind this page is readable here, and every ward’s number links to the live rows behind it.
- “Closed” means Completed. A cancelled request is an administrative close, not a service delivered, and is excluded from timing.
- Days to close is the closed timestamp minus the created timestamp. Negative durations and rows with no ward are dropped, and the counts of everything dropped are printed with the claim they affect.
- Ranking floor. Headline fastest/slowest and rank positions come only from wards with at least 200 completed requests of that type. Thinner wards are shown, flagged, and unranked - excluded from nothing, trusted for less.
- Gaps over ratios. Ward differences are stated in absolute days. When the fastest ward’s median is near zero a ratio inflates into a number nobody should print, so we don’t print it.
- What’s off the board. Informational calls and aircraft noise complaints are logged at city facilities (the 311 call center in Ward 28; O’Hare in Ward 41), so they describe a building, not a neighborhood. Types that close almost instantly citywide stay on the board with that fact stated.
Questions & comments
Corrections, ideas, and complaints about our complaint rankings: after.hours.builder@gmail.com. Answered after hours, which is when Chicago fills out forms anyway.
Privacy
- No accounts, no tracking pixels, and the site sets no cookies of its own.
- “Use my location” is resolved against the ward map inside your browser. Your coordinates are never transmitted anywhere.
- Address lookup sends the address you type directly to the City of Chicago’s public data API to find a matching 311 record. We never see it and don’t store it.
- Our hosting provider (Vercel) and Google Fonts receive standard web requests (IP address, user agent) to serve the page, as with any website.
Terms
- chiwardboard is an independent project and is not affiliated with the City of Chicago.
- The numbers describe how requests were recorded, which is not always how work happened. Provided as-is, for information, with no warranty. Check the receipts before you quote us at a community meeting - that’s what they’re for.
- Underlying records are public data provided by the City of Chicago under its data terms.