When New York Complains About Noise
Every 311 noise complaint in NYC for a year, arranged around the clock. The city's loudest hours aren't when you'd guess.
What you’re looking at
Each wedge is one hour of the day. Its length is how many noise complaints New Yorkers filed to 311 during that hour across a full year. The color runs from deep night-blue through daylight and back again, so you can read the daily rhythm at a glance.
Why it’s interesting
The intuitive guess — that noise complaints peak during the loud, busy daytime — is wrong. Complaints climb through the evening and stay high late into the night, long after the streets quiet down. The pattern tracks when noise becomes personal: you notice the party next door when you’re trying to sleep, not at 2pm when you’re at work. The dial bottoms out in the pre-dawn hours, then stays low all morning.
It’s a small, human signal hiding in an administrative dataset: 311 doesn’t measure how loud the city is, it measures when the city is loud enough to bother someone.
About the data
Pulled from NYC Open Data’s 311 Service Requests, filtered to noise-related complaint types and grouped by hour of day. It’s a static snapshot committed to the repo — the daily pattern is stable year over year, so there’s no need to refresh it live.