Question
Can need be measured with administrative records?
Cities increasingly use their records to make decisions: service complaints, app reports, crime reports, business directories. In the cases we analyzed, those records almost never measure need directly. They measure a combination of need, access to the channel and the way things are recorded.
Those who are best served complain the most
In Montevideo, the highest complaint rates are in well-served neighborhoods (140 to 189 per 1,000 residents a year) and the lowest in neighborhoods such as Casavalle, Las Canteras, Villa García and Conciliación (55 to 76), several of them among those with the most collection delays. Across neighborhoods, the relationship between delays and container complaints is weak (0.17). In Cancún, low-income areas file half as many driver reports per resident as the rest, because only 26% of their homes have a car, compared with 58%; per driver, however, they report more potholes and more crashes.
Records follow activity, not population
In San Pedro Garza García, community and public-order records are more closely related to economic activity (0.70) than to resident population (0.50), and the nightlife corridors with the most incidents generate almost no service complaints. In Guadalupe, Nuevo León, only 26% of victims reported the crime, and a sharp drop in drug arrests (from 83 to 17 a week) showed that the way of recording had changed, not the phenomenon.
Location is recorded too
In Bogotá, half of the 209,861 crashes lie 0.1 m or less from the street centerline, and the reported segment matches the nearest one in 97.4% of cases, but the points were located by address: they are useful for comparing streets, not intersections. In Cancún, INEGI’s business directory did not register the pandemic: 2020 was the best year of the decade.
What to do with a record
Records are useful when they are read for what they are. To measure a service, it is better to use operational data that do not depend on someone complaining, such as the daily snapshot of containers in Montevideo. To set priorities, records are normalized by who is able to report: people, drivers or activity. And before reading a change as a result, check whether the way of recording changed.