Traffic Crashes - Crashes

Crash data shows information about each traffic crash on city streets within the City of Chicago limits and under the jurisdiction of Chicago Police Department (CPD). Data are shown as is from the electronic crash reporting system (E-Crash) at CPD, excluding any personally identifiable information. Records are added to the data portal when a crash report is finalized or when amendments are made to an existing report in E-Crash. Data from E-Crash are available for some police districts in 2015, but citywide data are not available until September 2017. About half of all crash reports, mostly minor crashes, are self-reported at the police district by the driver(s) involved and the other half are recorded at the scene by the police officer responding to the crash. Many of the crash parameters, including street condition data, weather condition, and posted speed limits, are recorded by the reporting officer based on best available information at the time, but many of these may disagree with posted information or other assessments on road conditions. If any new or updated information on a crash is received, the reporting officer may amend the crash report at a later time. A traffic crash within the city limits for which CPD is not the responding police agency, typically crashes on interstate highways, freeway ramps, and on local roads along the City boundary, are excluded from this dataset.

All crashes are recorded as per the format specified in the Traffic Crash Report, SR1050, of the Illinois Department of Transportation. The crash data published on the Chicago data portal mostly follows the data elements in SR1050 form. The current version of the SR1050 instructions manual with detailed information on each data elements is available <a href="https://idot.illinois.gov/Assets/uploads/files/Transportation-System/Manuals-Guides-&-Handbooks/Safety/Illinois Traffic Crash Report SR 1050 Instruction Manual 2019.pdf">here</a>.

As per Illinois statute, only crashes with a property damage value of $1,500 or more or involving bodily injury to any person(s) and that happen on a public roadway and that involve at least one moving vehicle, except bike dooring, are considered reportable crashes. However, CPD records every reported traffic crash event, regardless of the statute of limitations, and hence any formal Chicago crash dataset released by Illinois Department of Transportation may not include all the crashes listed here.

Change 11/21/2023: We have removed the RD_NO (Chicago Police Department report number) for privacy reasons.

Querying over HTTP

Splitgraph serves as an HTTP API that lets you run SQL queries directly on this data to power Web applications. For example:

curl https://data.splitgraph.com/sql/query/ddn \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d@-<<EOF
{"sql": "
    SELECT *
    FROM \"cityofchicago/traffic-crashes-crashes-85ca-t3if\".\"traffic_crashes_crashes\"
    LIMIT 100 
"}
EOF

See the Splitgraph documentation for more information.