Two neighboring cities log every complaint, question, and report their residents send them. Read together, the logs beat like a pulse: snow in winter, potholes in spring, rats in summer. This is the last ten years, Jul 2016 through Jun 2026, with both feeds current.
Weekly request volume for each city, on its own scale: Somerville's line runs roughly 8× Cambridge's because it counts every phone call, while Cambridge counts filed issue reports. The rhythms still match. Both flatline every Thanksgiving week, and the sharpest spikes are storms, capped by the late-January 2026 blizzard, the biggest week on record for both cities at once. The one non-storm spike: Nov 2020, when Cambridge logged 1,135 missed yard-waste pickups in leaf season.
Requests per week
Hover for exact weeks. Same timeline, independent y-scales.
Each complaint type owns a season, and it owns the same season in both cities. The clocks below show how each city's year of complaints distributes across the twelve months (share of the category's annual total, so the two cities are comparable despite different volumes). Snow work peaks in January and February, potholes follow in March as the freeze-thaw cycle breaks the roads open, and rodent complaints run hot from late spring through midsummer.
Ten winters of daily snow and ice complaints: Somerville above the line, Cambridge mirrored below, all rows on one shared scale. The two cities spike on the same days, because they share the same sky: the January 2018 bomb cyclone, the Kenan blizzard of January 2022, and the back-to-back storms of early 2026, the biggest in the dataset, all land as twin spikes.
Daily snow & ice complaints, Nov 1 to Apr 15
Somerville ↑ · Cambridge ↓ · shared scale, hover any day
Cambridge geocodes every rodent sighting, which makes the pandemic legible on a street grid: sightings ran at roughly 200 a year through 2019, then more than tripled in 2020 as restaurants closed and rats went looking, and stayed high through 2022 before easing. Only Cambridge can be mapped, because Somerville publishes no coordinates, but Somerville's yearly counts tell the same story: complaints more than doubled into a 2021 peak of 2,250, and both cities have eased since without returning to pre-pandemic levels.
Rodent sightings
Each dot is a ~100 m grid cell. Dot area = sightings per year in the selected period.
Rodent complaints per year
Somerville rat & rodent-program calls; Cambridge sighting reports. 2026 is partial.
Somerville
Cambridge
SOMERVILLE_311_REQUESTS.LIST_SERVICE_REQUESTS (1,149,882 rows, Jul 2015 to present) and CAMBRIDGE_311.LIST_311_CASES (149,609 rows, 2009 to present) in the DEMO Snowflake database, both current through Jul 20, 2026. Comparisons use the last ten years, Jul 2016 through Jun 2026.