New reporting method could improve cities’ responses to residents’ calls for service

Cornell Tech researchers have developed a method to identify delays in reporting incidents such as downed trees and power lines, which could lead to practical insights and interventions for fairer and more efficient government service .

Their method, which works without knowing exactly when an incident occurred, uses the frequency of reports of the same incident by separate individuals to estimate how long it took for the incident to be first reported. The first report establishes that the incident occurred and subsequent reports are used to establish the reporting rate.

Applying their method to more than a million incident reports in New York and Chicago, the researchers also determined that the socioeconomic characteristics of a neighborhood are correlated with reporting rates.

“We designed a fairly general method that works for a large class of these problems, known as ‘benchmark problems,’ where you can get duplicate reports of an incident,” said Nikhil Garg, professor assistant for operations research and information engineering. ORIE) at Cornell Tech, as part of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute.

Garg is the lead author of “Quantifying Spatial Under-reporting Disparities in Resident Crowdsourcing,” published Dec. 5 in Nature Computational Science.

“We are optimistic that this method can be used to understand underreporting,” he said, “not just in 311 (citizen hotline) systems, but more broadly where these issues reference appear.”

Garg’s co-authors are Zhi Liu, lead student author and doctoral student at ORIE, and Uma Bhandaram, deputy chief of data systems and analytics for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

Crowdsourcing is an essential component of urban management; teams can’t be everywhere at the same time and they rely on residents to report problems to the appropriate authorities so they can be resolved. Major cities, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston, the four largest U.S. cities, have reporting systems that residents can log into to report problems.

“The 311 system is an important system,” Garg said. “New York City, for example, can’t always know where all the problems are with approximately 700,000 street trees – New York receives more than 3 million requests for service per year from the public. For us, it started with a general question: Who actually participates in all these participatory mechanisms that underpin government? »

“This is also one of the issues that municipal agencies are interested in: that people behave differently,” Liu said. “So how do they respond to these requests?”

Garg and Liu’s model takes the available information (the occurrence of an incident and the public’s reporting behavior related to that incident) and converts it into a Poisson rate estimation task, which expresses the probability that a given number of events occur within a fixed interval. time or space.

Without knowing exactly when the incident occurred, the method uses the number of reports between the time of the first report (but not including it) and an estimated incident resolution time to quantify the incident rate function. This method could allow city managers to determine reporting rates for different types of incidents in different neighborhoods and resolve problems more equitably.

The researchers applied their method to more than 100,000 resident reports to the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, as well as more than 900,000 reports to the Department of Transportation and the Department of Environmental Management. Chicago water. Even after controlling for incident characteristics, such as the level of emergency response needed, they found that some neighborhoods reported incidents three times faster than others.

The disparities corresponded to the socio-economic characteristics of the neighborhoods. In New York, reporting rates were positively correlated with higher population density; the proportion of people with a university degree; income; and the fraction of the population that is white.

The researchers were able to further validate their method by testing it on incidents whose exact times were known.

“We find overwhelming evidence that people use 311 systems differently,” Liu said. “And when we think about the downstream response to these reports, that can serve as a really good reference point. Let’s say no one reports an incident and it’s been there for an extended period of time: we might want to respond to it more quickly, so the overall delay is similar in all neighborhoods.”

And as Liu said, their system promotes fairness by addressing the most pressing problem first.

“One of the main conclusions is that there is no need to make a trade-off between equity and efficiency,” he said. “Sometimes they are aligned: The most serious incidents should be addressed more quickly throughout the city, no matter where they occur. So, in that sense, equity and efficiency are really aligned.”

Garg said: “There is so much work left to do, and our team continues to do it, to make these systems more efficient and more equitable. »