How LA talks to 311: questions by phone, work orders by app

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 595,057 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 141,391 “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 453,532 actual service requests — fix this, haul this away, this light is out. 63% 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:

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: 6,084 requests are marked “driver self-reported” — 99.8% of them graffiti-removal jobs, crews logging what they spot from the truck — plus 4,605 filed by the city's recycLA trash haulers and 1,626 routed through council offices. Second, the long tail of doors LA keeps open: 533 voicemails, 158 web chats, 56 social-media reports, 8 letters, 4 walk-ins — and exactly one fax.