Insights from Kansas City's 311 pothole data, updated live.
Every chart on this page is drawn from Kansas City, Missouri's public 311 dataset at the moment you load it. Nothing is cached, estimated, or adjusted. The charts cover pothole reports only, whether residents filed them by phone or online. The city has used two labels for them: “Street Maintenance – Pothole” until the end of 2023, then its own “A Pothole” issue type, with about a thousand 2024 reports still under the old label. The charts count both, so they run from late February 2021, when the dataset begins. That makes 2021 a partial year with no January and only a few days of February. A few of these charts are easy to misread, so each one has a note underneath saying exactly what it counts.
Total pothole reports filed each year, counted by the date each report was opened. The current year is still in progress, so its bar will keep growing until December, and 2021 is missing January and most of February because the dataset starts late that month. Years with ten or fewer reports are left off, so a handful of stray records doesn't show up as a year of its own.
The average number of days from when a report was opened to when it was marked resolved, grouped by the year it was opened. Only resolved reports count, which has two effects. Canceled reports are left out. So are reports that are still open, which makes the most recent year look faster than it will once its slow cases close. This is also an average rather than a median, so a few reports that sat open for a year or more pull it upward. For typical waits and the full spread of repair times, see How long does Kansas City take to fix a pothole?
Every pothole report on file, split by its current status. Open means the city has received the report and hasn't closed it. Resolved means the city closed it as done. Canceled means it was closed without being marked resolved, and the dataset doesn't record why. Understanding Kansas City's 311 data covers what each status can and can't tell you.
How residents filed their reports. Web is reports submitted online, and Call is reports taken over the phone by 311 staff. Any other labels come straight from the city's data. If you haven't reported a pothole before, here is how to do it.
The ten street addresses with the most pothole reports, all years combined. Reports are grouped by the exact address the city recorded, so one bad stretch of road can be split across several neighboring addresses. Read this as a list of hot spots rather than a precise ranking. Many reports at one address can mean a pothole that keeps coming back after patching, or just a lot of people reporting the same one. Click a bar to open that spot on the map.
Reports per calendar month, with one line per year. Years with 50 or fewer reports are hidden. In cold-climate cities, reports usually rise in late winter and early spring, when freezing and thawing breaks up the pavement, and these lines show whether Kansas City follows that pattern in a given year. Why Kansas City gets so many potholes explains the causes.
These are reports, not potholes. One pothole on a busy street can get reported many times, and a single report can describe more than one pothole. A year with more reports may have had more potholes, or just more people reporting them.
“Days to close” tracks the ticket, not the asphalt. It counts the days until the city's system marked the report resolved. That usually lines up with when the repair happened, but the data can't confirm it.
The data is shown as the city recorded it. KC Streets doesn't correct or remove records beyond the filters described above. To look at specific reports instead of totals, search any address on the pothole map.
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