Part 4 of 9 in After You Call: A Deep Dive on Philly 311

I have been staring at the same number for three weeks: 23,229. That's how many Philadelphia 311 service requests are currently on the city's books that haven't been touched in over a year. The number is blunt. I assumed I'd measured something wrong. I had not.

The 88% open-ticket stat

I expected a smooth decay curve. What I got was almost a step function: recently active (4.8% under a week) or long-abandoned (61.7% over six months), with almost nothing in the middle. Once a ticket goes a few weeks without a touch, the data suggests it never gets touched again.

The 88% is a lower bound on abandonment, not an upper bound. The 311 dataset logs the last time a case was updated, not the first time it was touched. A case sitting untouched for two years could have been touched daily for its first three months and then abandoned — or it could never have been touched at all. The data cannot tell us which.

The abandoned-90d-or-worse group is 56,755 tickets. The city has 56,755 service requests on the books that have not been touched in three months or longer. Some of these are chronic complaints that nobody can fix — a sinkhole that needs a state agency, a private-property issue with no responsible party, a long-permitting case. But "nobody can fix it" is not the same as "nobody responded." The data shows the latter.

What "filed and forgotten" looks like

Out of 557,011 service tickets logged between January 2024 and June 2026, 304,519 (54.7%) had no recorded touch within seven days of filing. That's the "filed and forgotten" cohort. A touch can be anything in the system — an agent acknowledgment, a status change, a field-crew dispatch, a closure. If a ticket was filed and went more than a week without any of those events, the citizen who reported the problem heard nothing back.

On the other end, only 67,816 tickets (12.2%) got a touch within one day. The 12% is the system working. The 55% in the middle is the system not working but not yet abandoned. The 88% is the system not even trying.

The full distribution: 12.2% touched in under a day, 28.3% within three days, 45.3% within a week. The long tail is enormous — 220,500 tickets (39.6%) took more than 30 days between filing and last update, and 5.4% took more than a year. For closed tickets, "last update" is usually the close event itself, so those long-tail numbers describe cases that didn't close for a month, a year, or longer. For open tickets they describe cases that haven't been touched since.

When the city is working

The city is staffed nine to five. Philadelphians file 311 requests when they get home from work. The mismatch shows up in the data: filings peak at 2–3pm (54,147 and 52,752 tickets respectively) and stay elevated through 8pm. City updates peak at noon and 3pm, with the bulk of activity between 10am and 6pm. The most-crowded four hours of the day — 5pm to 8pm, when people walk past the pothole on their way to the bus — are the four hours when update volume is tapering down.

The weekend pattern is sharper. Saturday and Sunday filings together are 8.4% of weekly volume, crammed into 48 hours when the city is mostly closed. Sunday updates are 2.2% of the weekly total. A ticket filed Tuesday closes in 10.9 days. A ticket filed Saturday closes in 16.9. That six-day difference is small in absolute terms — the queue is slow either way — but it lines up exactly with the city's own schedule.

Where the system can't keep up

The same-day touch rate is uneven across agencies in a way that doesn't track what I'd have guessed. The agency with the highest acknowledgment rate is the one whose name is on the building: the Philly311 Contact Center itself, with a 54.9% same-day touch rate and a 74.0% one-week touch rate. The contact center is the intake desk — a ticket logged through 311 will usually be marked up on the same day the citizen calls. After that handoff, the case leaves the contact center's hands and moves to whichever city agency owns the work.

The agency with the lowest same-day touch rate is the Community Life Improvement Program (CLIP), at 4.4%. CLIP handles 41,814 service tickets — graffiti, opioid-response cleanup, some maintenance complaints — and touches only 4.4% of them within 24 hours of filing. That is the worst same-day acknowledgment rate in the system. The 7-day acknowledgment rate is 39.4% — meaning 60.6% of CLIP tickets wait more than a week for a first touch.

Streets has the most tickets per year and the second-lowest acknowledgment rate. The agency doing the most work is the second-worst at responding to it.

What it means

The 311 system can absorb shocks. It can absorb a blizzard that generates 3,000 calls in a day. It can absorb a snow emergency, a primary election, a water-main break. It is built to handle spikes.

What it cannot do is keep up with its own baseline. More than half of all service tickets (54.7%) go more than a week without a touch. A third of currently-open tickets (30.6%) have not been touched in over a year. The agencies that handle the bulk of the physical work (Streets, L&I, CLIP) are the ones with the lowest acknowledgment rates. This is not a question of who staffs up for a snowstorm. It is a question of what "filed and forgotten" is the system's normal resting state.

The number that keeps coming back to me is 23,229. Tickets that nobody has touched in over a year. Some of those are unfixable. Most of them are not.

Notes, Sources, and Methodology

All data is the OpenDataPhilly 311 Service Requests table public_cases_fc, pulled on 2026-06-08. The cohort is 557,011 service requests from 2024-01-01 forward, excluding service_name = 'Information Request'.

Methodology notes. [1] Agency acknowledgment chart: nine agencies shown. 1-day acknowledgment rate = share of all agency tickets (closed + open) whose updated_datetime falls within 1 day of requested_datetime. The 7-day acknowledgment rate is the same with a 7-day window. For closed tickets, “touched” effectively means “closed” because the close event is itself a touch. For open tickets, “touched” means any system update within the window. The CLIP rate is the floor of the chart at 4.4%; the Philly311 Contact Center rate is the ceiling at 54.9%. [2] Open-ticket staleness histogram: 75,929 open tickets as of the 2026-06-08 data pull. Staleness = (pull date) − updated_datetime, in days, floored at zero for any ticket updated after the pull. The headline “30+ day” claim is this metric: 66,889 of 75,929 open tickets have staleness over 30 days. The data does not separate “touched on day 1 and then ignored” from “never touched at all.”