50 Million Noise Complaints Extrapolated For A Population Of Over 300 Million Would Be Somewhere Near 1.9 Billion Noise Complaints

311 passed the 50 million-call milestone earlier today:

“We have now handled more calls than Apple has sold iPods. As of today, they’ve only sold 49 million,” DoITT Commissioner Paul J. Cosgrave said.

Since its inception in March of 2003, 311 has fielded and average of 40,000 calls a day and has reduced the amount of calls to 911 for non-emergencies by one million.

“That means that our 911 dispatchers are free to send responders to a fire in a matter of seconds, and who knows how valuable those seconds actually are,” Bloomberg said.

According to Cosgrave, the number one complaint that 311 dispatchers deal with is noise.

That is followed by calls from people who are without heat or hot water in the winter, questions about how to pay for parking tickets are the third most common complaint, Freon removal and scheduling a pickup for air conditioners and refrigerators follows and questions about bus and subway information rounds out the top five.

And as befits a top-tier presidential candidate, Mayor Bloomberg was on hand to celebrate 311’s success:

“I have no plans of bringing 311 to a federal level,” he said to the amusement of the assembled press, “But there’s absolutely no reason why the federal government, with a budget of trillions of dollars, should not make available access to services that the average person can get to.”

Not to discredit an astounding achievement for the mayor, but if there were 50 million calls to 311 and 8 million people live in New York, that means that in a little over four years, each of us has called 311 six-and-one-quarter times*. Is that possible? Or are there 311 addicts out there who just can’t get enough information on how to pay parking tickets?

*I’ll admit, we used it once to locate a strip club in Putnam County; they couldn’t help us with that one.