What the numbers on this site actually measure — and, just as importantly, what they don't.
Everything on KC Streets is pulled live from Kansas City's public 311 service-request dataset on the city's open data portal. Nothing is cached, edited, or editorialized — when you load a page, your browser queries the city's data directly and renders what comes back. If the city corrects a record, you see the correction on your next search.
A 311 record is created when a resident reports a problem, either through the city's website or by calling. It is a record of a report, not of a pothole. That distinction runs through everything below.
Open — the request has been received and has not been closed out. On this site these are red. An open ticket means the city has been told and has not marked the job done. It does not tell you whether a crew has looked at it.
Resolved — the city closed the request as handled. Green. This means the city says it dealt with it. It does not guarantee the road is actually fixed, or that the fix lasted; a cold patch in February can be gone by April, and if nobody reports it again, the record still reads "resolved."
Canceled — the request was closed without being addressed. Gray. There are legitimate reasons for this: duplicate reports of the same hole, locations that turn out to belong to the state or a private owner rather than the city, or reports too vague to act on. There are also less satisfying ones. The dataset rarely says which.
By default the lookup page shows open reports only, because that's the question most people are asking. Use the Status filter to bring the other two back.
It measures two different things depending on the row, which is worth knowing before you quote it at anybody.
For a resolved or canceled report, it's the city's own days_to_close figure — how long the request sat between being opened and being closed.
For an open report, the city has no closure date to report, so we compute it: today's date minus the date the request was opened. That number grows every day the ticket stays open. It is the honest answer to "how long has this been sitting there," and it's the number behind the Hall of Fame's "Still Waiting" list.
Sorting the Days column sorts on the computed value, so open and closed rows rank against each other sensibly rather than open rows all falling to the bottom as blanks.
The Source field records how the report reached the city — through the web form or over the phone. It's a useful reminder that the dataset reflects who reports, not where the problems are. Neighborhoods where people know about 311, have the time to use it, and expect it to work will show more reports than neighborhoods where none of that is true. Fewer reports on a block does not mean better streets. It is one of the most common ways this kind of data gets misread.
Reports are also split between potholes in the street and potholes in the alley, and many carry a free-text detail the reporter typed in. We surface both where they exist.
The corollary is that the data improves when more people file. If a hole near you isn't in here, reporting it to 311 is what puts it in.
The lookup page queries by map viewport, not by radius from a pin. Whatever rectangle of the city you're currently looking at is the area being searched, so zooming out widens the search and panning re-runs it. That's why the results table changes as you move the map.
Address searches are resolved to coordinates by open geocoders, and geocoding is imperfect — "5701 Grand" and "5701 Grand Ave" are not equally easy to resolve, and a house number that doesn't exist in the map data may not resolve at all. If a search doesn't find your address, adding the street type usually fixes it.
Each report is plotted at the coordinates attached to its record. Those coordinates are typically the nearest address the intake system matched, not a survey of the hole itself, so treat a marker as "this block" rather than "this exact spot."
One pothole can be many records, and many potholes can be one record. A bad stretch of road that five neighbors each reported produces five tickets. A single ticket may cover a whole street.
Not every pothole is reported. The dataset is a floor, not a census.
Not every street is the city's. Interstates and some major routes are the state's responsibility. A canceled ticket is sometimes just the city correctly pointing that out.
"Resolved" is the city grading its own homework. It's the city's assertion that the request was handled, and that's all it is.
None of this makes the data useless — it's the best public record that exists of what Kansas City was told about its streets and when. It just means the honest reading is "here is what the city knew about, and how long it took them to close it out," rather than "here is every pothole in Kansas City."
If a pothole damaged your vehicle, the part of this data that matters is prior reports at that location that were still open on the day you were damaged. That combination — the city was told, and the city hadn't fixed it — speaks to whether the city had notice and a reasonable chance to act.
Search the location, note the ticket numbers and their open dates, and keep a screenshot. Then see the claim guide for what to do with it, or go straight to the letter generator.
Advertisement