Which areas of Toronto receive the most compliments

Think some parts of Toronto are better served than others? Now you can be the judge, using our analysis of Toronto’s 311 service data on compliments and complaints about municipal staff and services across the city.

311 is a phone number/web service that provides information for any city-related non-emergency. Toronto’s Open Data Portal allows anyone to download and use the 311 data that dates from January 2010 to June 2015. The data includes the type of request, the time and date it was requested, and a rough geographical description of from where it emerged.

There have been roughly 30 times more complaints than compliments since the service began in 2009. Karlene James from 311 Toronto noted that the data only reflects compliments that come to the city via the 311 service. “From time to time, we receive compliments from other City divisions and pass those along via email or service request,” she said in an email.

The most complimented division other than 311 is Solid Waste Management, for which James shared an example of some anonymous praise: "When it rains the crew turns the residents’ green bin upside down to ensure it does not fill up with water. Goes the extra mile." Another resident commented, “There was a lot of recycling this morning that the collection crew handled easily and with smiles. Caller said that typically they are very good, always placing the bins back at the correct spot and dealing with fly-aways. Caller wanted to make sure to let them know that they are appreciated."

In this analysis, two distributions have been visualized on a map of Toronto by Forward Sortation Area (FSA) – more simply, the physical boundaries of the first three digits of a postal code. All service calls containing the word compliment or complaint were individually summated by FSA. These totals were then converted to a rate using total 311 requests made from each area. Any requests that did not have an associated FSA were excluded from the dataset as other location descriptions were not standardized.

311 complaints cover a much larger spectrum and can be related to almost any municipal service. Complaints also vastly outnumber compliments with 97,585 logged since 2010, compared with 3,215 compliments over the same period.

On the map, complaints appear to cluster in the downtown core, while the rate of compliments varies across the city. There are some visual similarities between the distribution of socio-economic inequality (also known as Toronto’s “U-shape”) and the rate of compliments.