Noise in the City: Is New York Really That Noisy?

Link to the Project

Fall 2021
Intro to Urban Data Informatics
Columbia GSAPP

New York City can be an objectively noisy place — and most of its residents can attest to that fact.

But one thing they’d be less likely to know (or admit) is that New York City consistently tops the list of US cities with the highest number of noise complaints — not to be confused with the list of US cities with the highest noise levels. This is certainly quite odd because the city is constantly trying to combat noise pollution. On many scales, NYC is not even in the top 50 noisiest cities in the world.

This study aims to use Python to analyse the NYC 311 Calls database to verify the hypothesis that many of these complaints are unwarranted, leading to this disparity in noise complaint count and noise level ranking.