Finding · updated September 5, 2026
How LA talks to 311: questions by phone, work orders by app
99% of LA's 311 information lookups arrive by phone — but 61% of actual service requests now come in through the app or website. The big exception: bulky-item pickups, where most of LA still calls.
Los Angeles gives its residents a lot of doors into 311: a phone line, an app, a website, email, even a chat window. The city records which door every request came through, so across the 993,432 MyLA311 requests we have logged since April 7, 2026, we can say exactly how LA actually talks to its city — and it depends entirely on what LA is trying to say.
Questions come by phone. The single biggest block in the data is the 234,063 “information-only” cases — someone asking the city a question that never becomes a work order — and 99% of them arrived by phone call. Whatever else it has become, the 311 call center is first and foremost the city's switchboard.
Work orders come by app. Set the questions aside and look at the 753,813 actual service requests — fix this, haul this away, this light is out. 61% of those arrived digitally, through the MyLA311 app or website; 34% came by phone. But that average hides a clean gradient — sort the everyday request types by how often people phone them in, and a pattern appears:
| 311 request type | by phone | by app / website | requests |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bulky-item pickup | 57% | 43% | 202,969 |
| Dead animal removal | 48% | 51% | 15,450 |
| Tree emergencies | 38% | 61% | 4,745 |
| Illegal dumping | 30% | 69% | 200,441 |
| Sidewalk problems | 21% | 77% | 4,574 |
| Streetlight repair | 18% | 81% | 10,774 |
| Right-of-way obstructions | 17% | 82% | 8,159 |
| Street sweeping | 17% | 82% | 4,346 |
| Landscape maintenance | 17% | 82% | 7,800 |
| Homeless encampments | 13% | 87% | 43,785 |
| Potholes & street pavement | 10% | 90% | 16,666 |
| Traffic safety | 9% | 89% | 5,589 |
| Graffiti removal | 4% | 72% | 108,372 |
| Parking issues | 2% | 98% | 5,064 |
| Dockless scooters & bikes | 1% | 99% | 10,596 |
At the top: the chores of household life. A bulky-item pickup request — a couch, a mattress, an old washing machine — still comes in by phone 57% of the time. At the bottom: the annoyances of the streetscape. A report about dockless scooters & bikes almost never involves a human operator — 1% by phone, 99% through a screen. The data records the channel, not the person, so it can't say who is calling — but it says plainly that when the request is about your own home, LA still picks up the phone.
Two footnotes from the margins of the data. First, the city talks to itself: 25,352 requests are marked “driver self-reported” — 99.9% of them graffiti-removal jobs, crews logging what they spot from the truck — plus 5,209 filed by the city's recycLA trash haulers and 2,737 routed through council offices. Second, the long tail of doors LA keeps open: 809 voicemails, 272 web chats, 105 social-media reports, 13 letters, 6 walk-ins — and exactly one fax.
How this was computed
Every MyLA311 request in our mirror, Apr 7–Sep 5, 2026, straight from data.lacity.org, using the city's ownorigin field for the channel. “App / website” is the feed's “Self Service” origin — it does not distinguish the app from the website, so neither do we. Channel shares are computed over the 987,876 requests that carry a recorded channel (5,556 don't); the service-request split excludes the information-only lookups counted separately above. The table covers the resident-facing request types we curate for the services pages, each with at least 1,000 recorded requests.