Anyone who has been in NYC for a long time has inevitably had an argument with a cab driver. Sometimes they won’t take you where you want to go. Sometimes they refuse to accept credit card. And when things escalate, sometimes you call 311.

Luckily for us, those calls give us some data to explore. I downloaded 2013 taxi complaint and compliment data from NYC’s 311 Data and had a look.

The data showed 15,947 taxi driver complaints in 2013, or about 43 complaints a day. That means the the average cab gets about one complaint every 3 months, but those could be spread between 2-3 drivers. Not shockingly, complaints are more common than compliments:

but 5% of such calls are indeed compliments! That is almost 3 compliments a day, or about one compliment for every 3 million New Yorkers!

We can also explore what time of day and day of week people complain the most:

The chart shows that 4PM is when complaints peak; this is also shift change time, so that may be partially to blame. Very often taxi drivers won’t take you where you want to go unless it’s on their way home.

Also note the late night weekend complaints shown in the upper left and right corners of the table. They are elevated through 5AM.

When did people complain the least? Christmas, when there were only 6 complaints. Second least? Thanksgiving, coming in at 18.

Complaints are filed all over the city, but they are most dense in Manhattan below 96th St, and at JFK and Laguardia:

The map also shows elevated levels around Atlantic Yards, and Cobble Hill.

As noted, there are elevated levels of complaints on weekend nights past midnight. What if we only look at late night weekend complaints on a map?

The map shows that late night weekend complaints are concentrated in neighborhoods like the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village. The problem with this map is that it will be affected by density… more people means more complaints.

To control for that, I took all zip-codes with at least 30 complaints. I then looked at the % of complaints that happen between the hours of midnight and 4AM on weekends. The results are charted below:

The area with the highest ratio of evening complaints? Williamsburg, where 20% of all taxi complaints happen after midnight on Saturday and Sunday AM.

The rest of the list looks familiar to anyone who has gone out in NYC:

Note that the leading zip codes for taxi complaints seem to map closely with the late night Citibike ridership I explored a couple months back.

Once taxi trip data become more open, we will be able to test the percentage of all rides that involve complaints and see if that changes at night or during holidays. But for now, don’t forget to compliment your drivers on 311! That will make you one in a million.. I mean three million!

Data Used: 311 Data and ZipCode Shapes

Tools Used: Excel, QGIS