RATFLOW NYC — Real-Time NYC Rat Map

🐀 RATFLOWNYC

REAL-TIME RODENT DENSITY ENGINE

INITIALIZING…<br>Data-art provocation. Not a public health resource.

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METHODOLOGY ▸

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EST. ACTIVE RODENTS

in current viewport

311 COMPLAINTS

rodent sightings on record

ACTIVITY INDEX

circadian × sanitation

DSNY CYCLE

curb-refuse window

How this map lies to you (honestly)

Every transit app renders trains. RATFLOW renders the other commuters.<br>This is a probabilistic estimate, not a census — there is no GPS on a rat.

01

Ingest. We pull rodent complaints from the NYC Open Data<br>311 Service Requests<br>feed (complaint_type = 'Rodent') and geocode each report.

02

Weight. Each complaint becomes a probability well, and every<br>MTA subway station a hotter one — the underground is the city's<br>densest rat habitat. We overlay the<br>DSNY<br>set-out schedule: curbside refuse windows raise local foraging pressure.

03

Extrapolate. A circadian curve (rats peak after dark) scales the field<br>into a live density estimate, then we Monte-Carlo a swarm of agents that crawl<br>the surface in real time.

04

Render. Each glowing dot is one modeled rodent. The red bloom is the<br>3D probability density. None of it is a single, traceable animal.

⚠︎ This is an art / data-provocation piece. The population is calibrated to<br>the credible ~2 million citywide estimate (Auerbach, 2014) — not the<br>debunked “8 million / one per person” myth — but the figures are modeled and<br>deliberately theatrical. Do not use for public-health decisions, real estate,<br>or to slander a specific block. Source data: NYC Open Data + MTA (public domain).

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