There are few melodies that evoke nostalgia for a muggy summer’s day in NYC as effectively as the ice cream truck song. There are few behaviors as evocative of the spirit of New York City as complaining about street noise. With 311 Service Request data available at our digital fingertips, we may (finally) quantify the frustration that New Yorkers feel when the ice cream trucks roll back out onto city streets as the weather warms up. In particular, we can explore how the volume of ice cream truck noise complaints have changed over time in New York City, and whether or not the seasons of peak ice cream truck noise complaints vary from year to year.

What Constitutes an Ice Cream Truck Noise Complaint

Any NYC resident with grievances to air may contact 311 online or by phone. These complaints are then categorized and acted upon (or not). For our purposes, we are discussing complaints that report “ice cream truck noise”, which reports bothersome music coming from ice cream trucks (noisy idling trucks are captured in a different category). In order for the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to issue a summons for a violation, an inspector must witness the offending ice cream truck playing music while parked, standing, or stopped in one location. In 2024 so far, just eight summonses have been issued: that is to say, 0.67% of all such complaints this year have resulted in official consequences. Over 78% of these complaints were resolved with a note that no violation was observed, pointing to some combination of complainants’ loose understanding of noise pollution regulations or the DEP’s unwillingness to enforce them.

Trends in Complaints Through the Years 

In my original proposal for this project, I suggested that we might be able to use ice cream truck complaint data to illustrate the impact that a warming planet has on New York’s soundscape. With 2023 being the city’s warmest year on record, I suspected that we might see an uptick in total ice cream truck noise complaints in that year, and a longer “peak complaint season.” Diving more deeply into the complaint data, though, I found that spikes in complaints resist simple prediction: complaints do not immediately correlate with daily temperatures. I have noted the “peak complaint seasons” below: the period of time between the first and last day in a given year that 311 received 10 or more ice cream truck noise complaints.

Here’s the same information presented vertically and aggregated by month. The peak seasons here are reinterpreted here with a reference line at 200 monthly complaints.

If we’re seeking a trend in these visualizations to sink our teeth into, we need not look any further than the year 2020. That consequential year features both the longest peak complaint season and some of the highest daily spikes. Let’s take a closer look.

What Happened in 2020

2020 was a devastating year for New York City – the COVID-19 pandemic ran unchecked through densely populated neighborhoods, sickening millions and radically changing the daily lives and habits of its residents. With many New Yorkers attempting to lead their lives while locked down at home, there were almost twice as many noise complaints in general in New York City in 2020 (802,745) as in the next closest year on record prior to 2020 (2016, with 420,489).

This trend is a bit less extreme when considering only ice cream truck noise complaints – instead of nearly doubling, those complaints only increased by about 16% from 2016 (1,777 ice cream truck noise complaints) to 2020 (2,059 complaints). Certain neighborhoods did see more significant upticks, though – while the entire borough of Staten Island only reported bothersome ice cream jingles on 33 occasions, one zip code (11355) within Flushing, Queens submitted 86 complaints in 2020.

Next Steps

Climate change moves slowly, and its societal impacts reveal themselves at an even more deliberate pace. I should not have expected to see definitive correlations in twelve years of data between higher average annual temperatures and the seasons of New York’s ice cream truck noise complaints. However, I do think that time may reveal this pattern – perhaps in another ten years, perhaps in twenty. We’ll just have to wait and see.

That being said, there are a few areas in which I would like to improve these visualizations in the nearer term.

The map visualization here would seriously benefit from normalization. To draw better conclusions around the actual prevalence of bothersome ice cream truck noise in a given neighborhood, it would be best to map complaints per capita within a borough or zip code, or complaints as a fraction of all noise complaints within a given borough or zip code.

Additionally, I would like to examine and visualize the zeroes in this dataset: showing gaps in line graphs on days when zero complaints were logged in NYC, filling out maps with zip codes that had zero complaints in a given window (instead of leaving those areas of the map entirely blank, which can be confusing).

A fun twist on this project would be to focus on particular neighborhoods, like Gus Saltonstall did in this fun article for the West Side Rag. The Flushing neighborhood that was home to the highest number of ice cream truck noise complaints in 2020 is also home to Kissena Park, the Queens Botanical Garden, and a piece of Flushing Meadows Park – it would be interesting to discover where complaints originate within that neighborhood.

Finally, I would like to find a way to make these visualizations more dynamic. For example, I created the reference bands for the “seasons” by simply selecting the first and last occurrence of 10 or more complaints in a day for each year. This was easily the most time-consuming element of generating the visualizations for this project, and it would not be a responsive solution if these visualizations were to be made interactive.