City Watch

What three Massachusetts cities reported to 311 on their latest full day of data that was unusual for that day of the week, measured against each category’s own recent history.

3categories ran well above normal on Wednesday, September 16.

Cambridge logged 13 requests under Botanical Obstruction on Wednesday, about 5.2 times its usual level for the day. Also above normal: Street Lights & Traffic Signals in Somerville at 3.0x and Street Light Outage in Boston at 1.9x.

Above normal

A category is listed when it is at least 1.8× its own same-weekday average for the previous four weeks, with a Poisson z of 2.5 or more to rule out small-number noise. Ranked by how far from normal, not by raw volume.

Also moving

Below the bar, but worth a look

These did not clear both thresholds. Most are high-volume categories where a statistically real rise is still a small relative change.

By city

The last 28 days

Each city has its own report, covering ninety days of volume, what moved on the latest day and the caveats specific to that feed.

Data freshness

Where each feed stands

Shown because these pipelines are new. If one stalls, a quiet day and a broken feed look identical unless the lag is on the page.

Boston
latest record 2026-09-16 23:59
last loaded 2026-09-17 14:03
285,462 rows · loaded 4h ago
Cambridge
latest record 2026-09-17 05:24
last loaded 2026-09-17 14:11
153,718 rows · loaded 3h ago
Somerville
latest record 2026-09-17 01:03
last loaded 2026-09-17 13:42
1,220,666 rows · loaded 4h ago

Sources: Boston via the Open311 GeoReport v2 API, Cambridge via the Commonwealth Connect dataset on the city’s Socrata portal, Somerville via its 311 dataset on data.somervillema.gov. Collected into BigQuery by Ingest and rebuilt daily.

Somerville’s feed is a contact-centre log rather than a service-request log, so informational calls are excluded here to keep the three cities counting comparable things. Boston publishes no closure timestamp, and Cambridge’s terminal status is Archived rather than Closed. None of the three is a like-for-like match for the others, and the per-category baselines used here never compare one city to another.

Page generated 2026-09-17 17:36 UTC.