311 Overload
From the People’s 311 Flickr pool.
Bloomberg isn’t just good at having the mainstream media fawn over him — now he’s got the bloggers on his side.
Last week, between blowing kisses at Bloomie, Louise from Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn wanted to know if any of us were at Bloomberg’s 311 buggie press conference.
No, no we were not. I might have been doing something more interesting…like turning my compost. I continued ignoring yet another subject I find painfully boring.
But finally, this morning, Carrie McLaren from Stay Free magazine alerted me to a project she is trying to launch: People’s 311. Fine, I’ll comment already.
My initial reaction was revulsion — 311 is just difficult enough to deal with so that you really have to be motivated to call in, generally guaranteeing the problem is big enough to even bother. But this expands the coverage and makes it nearly effortless for anyone with a camera to report every. little. infraction. — and it sort of reminds me of Cuba’s block captains. It probably doesn’t matter because the city will reject it — unions hate when people work cheaply or for free. Bad for business.
It’s not that I don’t think 311 can be useful — god knows I have used it — but I think bombarding the system with information about illegal advertising (who caaaares?) and 100-year-old peeling paint in the subways (come ON) can only dilute the effectiveness.
So what do you guys think? Is this super or Stasi?
August 23rd, 2007 at 12:42 pm
Sounds pretty pointless to me.
August 24th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
I agree with Jen. It sounds pretty pointless. Gathering the information and reporting infractions is somewhat useful, but as nothing will be done about it, it’s basically just someone’s little project.
It would be fun to create a site similar to People’s 311, except run by the city, which associates each of the infractions with a dollar amount. That amount is what NYC is willing to pay an independent contractor to fix the infraction. Contractors can bid on fixing a pothole (or series of potholes) or removing illegal advertising, or clearing out sewer grates of massive amounts of debris. This would put taxpayer money to work at competitive prices and actually get things done.
Of course, that would lead to corruption (people CREATING infractions so their business could get hired to fix it.)
Living in Utopia must be fun, eh?