The 4.1-day average that leaves out the 839 still open

Dark navy review slide, masthead “Building services desk · elevator complaints · monthly performance review” on the left and “NYC 311 · complaint type ‘Elevator’ · by month filed · data to 29 Oct 2026” on the right, headlined “Elevator complaints now close in four days — down 88% in a year.” A gold chip reads “Demonstration · drawn by us from public data”. A standfirst says the chart shows average days from filing to closure for 311 elevator complaints, routed to the Department of Buildings and grouped by the month each was filed, on a zero-based linear axis with every value printed, and that the average has fallen in nine of the last eleven months. A gold bar chart runs from November 2025 to October 2026: 33.6, 31.1, 28.5, 22.4, 22.6, 20.3, 21.4, 18.4, 16.8, 14.8, 10.2 and 4.1 days. Cards on the right read “−88% average time to close” and note that the four newest months are the four fastest; a read-out says the backlog is clearing and recommends holding inspector overtime and setting a four-day target for 2027; a card says each bar averages the complaints filed that month and closed in 311; and a table lists each month’s complaint count and average, from 1,669 complaints at 33.6 days in November 2025 to 1,528 at 4.1 in October 2026. The footer credits NYC Open Data’s 311 Service Requests dataset and says the desk, read-out and recommendation are invented. — Showing the misleading chart

Cream-background redraw kicked “The same 25,458 complaints · the same file · one clock” and headlined “The 4.1-day average that leaves out the 839 still open.” A standfirst says an average of closed complaints can only include the ones that have had time to close, that every month read about four days when it was new, that October 2026 is the only month still at its first reading, with 839 of its 1,528 complaints not yet closed, and that on a fixed clock October is the slowest month of the twelve. The main panel, “Each month’s average, read twice”, is a dot chart from November 2025 to October 2026 on a zero-based axis of days: for each month a hollow grey dot marks the average as it read at the end of the month it was filed, between 3.3 and 5.0 days, and a blue dot above it marks the average as it reads on 29 October 2026, from 33.6 for November down to 10.2 for September, each pair joined by a thin vertical line. October has a single orange dot at 4.1, labelled “839 of 1,528 open”. A right-hand panel, “One clock: share closed within 14 days of filing”, draws a line hovering between 57% and 68% from November to September, then dropping along a dashed segment to a hollow orange point at 49.0% for October, which counts only the 736 complaints filed by 15 October. A table lists, for every month, complaints filed, complaints still open, the month-end and current averages, and the 14-day share. Three notes below explain that a slow complaint enters the average only on the day it closes, that the year really did get faster on a fixed clock, with the share closed within 30 days rising from 65.1% to 77.8% between November and July while the plain average overstates the gain, and that the fix is to give every month the same clock and print the still-open count. — Showing the misleading chart

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A monthly review slide we drew from NYC 311 data says elevator complaints now close in four days, down 88% in a year: the average time to close falls from 33.6 days for complaints filed in November 2025 to 4.1 for October 2026. But the average only counts complaints that have closed, and 839 of October’s 1,528 haven’t closed yet. Every month in the year read about four days when it was new. On a fixed 14-day clock, October is the slowest month of the twelve.

NYC Open Data, 311 Service Requests from 2010 to Present (dataset erm2-nwe9), complaint type “Elevator”, complaints created 1 November 2025 to 29 October 2026, snapshot downloaded 1 November 2026 with its latest record filed 29 October 2026 at 20:27 (the live file keeps updating, so a re-run gives slightly different counts); averages, month-end readings and 14-day shares computed by us from the created and closed timestamps, 2026Added November 1, 2026

01The claim

Elevator complaints in New York now close in four days, down 88% in a year. A monthly review slide of the kind an operations desk might circulate, which we drew from the city’s public 311 file: average days from filing to closure for every 311 complaint of type “Elevator”, grouped by the month it was filed. Complaints filed in November 2025 took 33.6 days on average; complaints filed in October 2026 took 4.1. The average fell in nine of the eleven months between, the four newest months are the four fastest, and the axis starts at zero with every value printed.

02The trick

The average only counts complaints that have closed, and a complaint can only close after it has been filed. The slide was drawn on the last day of the file, 29 October 2026, so the October bar is an average over the 689 complaints that closed within days of filing; the 839 that hadn’t closed yet (status Open or Assigned) are not in the bar at all, and 620 of them are already older than the 4.1 days the bar reports. September is missing 424 of its 2,014 and August 127 of its 2,646, so the right-hand end of the chart is the shape of a deadline rather than a trend. You can watch it happen in the same file. Recompute each month’s average using only the complaints that had closed by the end of the month they were filed in, and every month in the year reads between 3.3 and 5.0 days: November 2025 read 3.5 on 1 December and has climbed to 33.6 since, as its slow complaints closed one by one over the following months. October 2026 is not unusually fast. It is the only month that hasn’t had time to be slow.

03The fix

Give every month the same clock. The redraw plots, for each month, the share of complaints closed within 14 days of filing, counting the ones still open as not closed, so a month with a long queue scores lower instead of dropping its queue from the sum. On that clock the year is roughly level, between 57.4% and 67.7% from November to September, and October — counting only the 736 complaints filed by 15 October, the ones that have had 14 days — is the slowest of the twelve at 49.0%; compared like for like, the first half of every other month scored between 56.8% and 65.9%. Beside it, each month’s average is drawn twice, at its month-end reading and at today’s, so the reader can see every month start near four days and climb. There was real improvement in the year: on the same 30-day clock the share closed rose from 65.1% (November) to 77.8% (July), and within 90 days from 86.1% to 98.0%. The fall in the plain average from 33.6 to 16.8 overstates even that, because July’s slowest complaints haven’t had as long to close, and the fall from 16.8 to 4.1 after July is mostly the clock. A closed-cases-only average is fine for a month that has finished closing; for the newest months, print the still-open count beside it, or don’t print it. (The month-end readings are reconstructed from closing dates and assume they are not revised later; closing dates are recorded to the day, and requests with status Assigned are counted as open. Closure is the status of the 311 request, not a record that an elevator was repaired.)