Broadway noise complaints did fall, and the real number is 34 percent over three years, from a record high. The city went the other way over the same window.
The Short Answer Is No
Broadway noise complaints did not drop 40 percent. Across the sixteen years of 311 records we hold, they went up. In January through July of 2010 the street generated 778 noise complaints. In the same seven months of 2026 it generated 3,249, more than four times as many.
There is a real fall inside that climb. Comparing like months to like months, Broadway peaked at 4,958 noise complaints in January through July of 2023. The same window this year came in at 3,249. That is a fall of 34 percent in three years, which is the largest fall the records support.
Broadway is a single street from the Battery to Marble Hill, and every score and count on this page covers all of it. There is no block-level Broadway in our data, so a quiet stretch in the nineties on the Upper West Side is averaged in with Times Square.
The Fall Belongs to Broadway, Not to 311
The obvious objection is that the whole city stopped calling. It did not. Over those same three seven-month windows, noise complaints citywide went from 378,314 to 411,499, a rise of about 9 percent. Broadway fell 34 percent while the city rose 9 percent, which is what makes the decline worth reporting at all.
What we cannot tell you is why. Complaint records register calls, not decibels, and a street that gets quieter and a street whose residents give up on calling look identical from here.
It Is Still One of the Loudest Addresses in New York
Broadway grades 58 overall and scores 16 on quiet. The grade holds up because the access measures are near the ceiling: transit 98, food access 95. The quiet score is near the floor of the scale.
Per home, over the last twelve months, Broadway generated roughly 240 noise complaints for every thousand homes on it. West End Avenue, one block west, generated roughly 40. That is six times the noise for the same number of front doors, and a 34 percent fall does not close a gap that size. West End Avenue is a whole-street number as well, and it runs beside Broadway only on the Upper West Side, so the comparison holds for those blocks rather than for the length of either street.
Where the Quiet Hides
The blocks a short walk off it score very differently on quiet.
- West End Avenue scores 93 on quiet and grades 92, the best pairing in this part of Manhattan
- West 60th Street scores 96 on quiet, with transit at 95 and food access at 93, across 7 residential buildings
- West 75th Street scores 89 on quiet, on 139 buildings, which is a real block rather than one address
- West 32nd Street scores 99, though it is a single development of 2 buildings holding 470 homes
West 60th Street sits in the nineties on transit, food access and quiet at once, so it gives up almost nothing for the quiet.
How to Use This
Look up the exact street and read the quiet score separately from the grade. The quiet column ranks a street against others of its own type, so 50 is the middle of that type and below 20 sits near the floor of it. Broadway is there. The side street off the same corner usually is not.
Scores are built from 311 complaints, HPD violations, NYPD crash records, NYPD felony complaint records, MTA stop locations, DOHMH food permits, and the street tree census, divided by the homes and businesses on the street, updated weekly.