Data Update 3

2) I asked some people I know who live in Vancouver about missed garbage pick-ups. I won't be using these since I'm changing my topic but these were the best three quotes I got:

"16,000 [complaints] still seems like a lot."
"No one wants to walk outside and see piles of garbage in front of their house."
"It's cramped where I live so one miss and it's like, where do I put this?"

3) One question I cannot answer with the data is the number of garbage trucks being used by the city and number of employees working at the waste disposal plants. This might explain why the number of missed garbage complaints have gone down. Their also might be a way to see if government spending on waste management services has increased. I might be able to find a government budget plan detailing sanitation spending on the City of Vancouver data portal. I could also check the City of Vancouver data portal for the number of employees hired between 2013 and 2014, but the number of extra trucks put into service would most likely not be listed. If I wanted to learn the number of extra trucks put in service I could probably just ask the waste management company for the data. If they refuse I could put forth an FOI request but I doubt that would be necessary.

*Note* I didn't expect incidents of missed garbage pick-ups to be going down so drastically so I'm changing my story to the success of the 3-1-1 information line and how it is becoming increasingly popular. I know it's a little late to change stories but I already have most of the data already cleaned from what I used for the garbage story but I didn't have time to do another Data Update. I just need to sort it differently.

Data Update 2

Lead:

Nine months into 2014, over 16,000 complaints have been directed to Vancouver's 3-1-1 city helpline regarding missed garbage, recycling, or organic waste pick ups. Citizens clearly aren't happy, so what is causing the missed garbage pick-ups and why is hasn't the situation improved?

Interview subject: The city of Vancouver has a directory of people who work in human resources and PR that manages the 3-1-1 helpline. The directory list which department the individual works in and the the individuals direct phone line rather then the randomly assigned 3-1-1 line. This is one of the names I found on the directory.

- Joanna Cheng

Link to sorted data. I put the data in a pivot table because the data I used is thousands of rows long.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bx1CkPRwWPF9ekp1VThIeE5laGs/view?usp=sharing