A Second Walk Through Fairmount Finishes the Abandoned Car Project We Started Last Week on a Whim
This Sunday at 830am, we set out to finish up the job we started last week. Today, we visited 16 potential abandoned cars spread over 3.5 miles, and found 14 were already gone!
Sunday morning, 8:30am. My wife and I got our son into our Bob jogging stroller, although today we weren't jogging, and headed west on Fairmount Avenue. Same idea as last Saturday— pull the open 311 abandoned-car tickets for the next neighborhood over, plot a walking route, and see what was there. Last week was Francisville. This week, the west side.
This was West Fairmount — between 24th and 29th, north of Fairmount Avenue. Sixteen addresses with open abandoned-vehicle tickets from 2026, about three and a half miles round trip at our usual pace. We worked north and west block by block, knocking on each address in turn.
At the end of this walk, we have now visited every open Fairmount+Francisville abandoned car ticket from 2026. There are lots from 2025 and before that are still open, and we might get to those in the future, but we wanted to focus on the ones that someone else reported reasonably recently, and try and effect a change on them. If nothing else, we found that one family could track down all abandoned cars in an entire neighborhood in just a few short family walks.
The walk
Of the sixteen open tickets, fourteen of the cars were already gone. They had been towed, the owner had come back for them, or somebody had moved them down the block — and 311 had no way of knowing. The ticket was still listed as open, but the car was not on the block. Two of the sixteen were still sitting in exactly the spot the original ticket described, in case anyone at the city is reading this and wants a quick win.
The comparison to last week
For comparison, on the first walk through Francisville, only 7 of the 13 tickets had been resolved in reality — about half. Here on the second walk, 14 of 16 — close to ninety percent — were already gone. That is a real swing.
Why the swing
We did not expect the difference to be that large. Two explanations, both probably contributing. The first is the FIFA Fan Fest at Lemon Hill, which ran for most of June and July. The fan fest brought temporary local parking rule changes and required special resident parking permits for the neighborhood for the past two months — enough to clear more abandoned and improperly parked vehicles than usual.
The second, more speculative: the neighborhood. West Fairmount is meaningfully wealthier than Francisville; the median household income on this side of 24th is comfortably higher than on the other side. Consistent with my earlier work on city service levels by income, higher-income addresses may get faster service. Even without the fan fest, the second walk’s outcome was probably the more likely one — though we are working with a sample of two walks, not a controlled study.
The detail that should bother the dashboards
The open tickets we walked past on Sunday averaged 106 days old, but 88 percenthad already been solved in practice. That means open-ticket length is not really a measure of the city’s performance. The city is doing the work, and doing a bad job of tracking the good work it is doing.
That is good news — the work is happening. It is also bad news, because without timely data nobody can measure the impact, and some city employee will end up wasting time trying to resolve a problem that is already resolved. That is essentially what we did on this walk: showed up at 88 percent of the addresses only to find the cars already gone.
What two walks can do
In just two walks, comprising 6.5 total miles in beautiful weather together as a family, armed with just a phone and some public data, we were able to locate every open abandoned car ticket in the Fairmount and Francisville neighborhoods.
First, I want to thank the 311 system for making this data available.
Second, I want to reiterate that the hard step, which we’re now trying, is to get our free “audit” of the data into the hands of city employees, so they can update their systems and take actions on the abandoned vehicles that remain.
Notes and Sources
Open ticket data came from the public 311 dataset on OpenDataPhilly, same as last week. We pulled the open 2026 abandoned-vehicle tickets in 19130 and walked to 13 on Saturday and 16 more on Sunday. For each address we recorded whether the car was still there, and photographed it when it was. The “gone” counts reflect what we saw on the block, not what 311’s status field said.