================================================================================ CHICAGO'S MOST DANGEROUS INTERSECTIONS — 2026 PRESS & DATA PACK Analysis by Zayed Law Offices, Chicago ================================================================================ Everything here is free to publish, embed or republish with credit. You do not need to ask permission. If you need a different cut of the data, a figure that is not in these files, or comment from Adam Zayed, the contact is at the end. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. WHAT THIS STUDY FOUND -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Counting crashes mostly measures traffic. We ranked every major junction in Chicago on how badly people get hurt when a crash happens there instead. * The most dangerous intersection in Chicago is Ashland Ave & 74th St in West Englewood. A crash there does 2.49 times the human damage of an average Chicago crash. * All twenty of the worst are on the South or West Side. None is downtown or on the North Side. * Not one of Chicago's twenty busiest junctions appears in the severity top 20. The busiest, Grand Ave & State St, sees 3,531 crashes but runs at 0.69x the citywide severity rate — well below average. Full write-up: https://zayedlawoffices.com/blog/most-dangerous-intersections-in-chicago/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2. CREDIT — REQUIRED -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Text credit: Chicago's most dangerous intersections, analysis by Zayed Law Offices https://zayedlawoffices.com/blog/most-dangerous-intersections-in-chicago/ If you publish either image, it already carries the credit and the basemap attribution in the bar along its bottom edge. Please do not crop that off — "Basemap (c) CARTO, (c) OpenStreetMap contributors" is a licensing requirement, not a house style preference. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3. WHAT IS IN THIS PACK -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- chicago-most-dangerous-intersections-map.png 1,966 KB 2578 x 2024. The map with the full top 20 listed alongside it, titled and credited. Print resolution. Use this if you want one image that tells the whole story. chicago-most-dangerous-intersections-top20.png 284 KB 1800 x 1636. The ranking as a clean table, no map. Better for a narrow column or where the map would be too small to read. chicago-most-dangerous-intersections-top20.csv 6 KB 60 rows. The top 20 under all three rankings — injury severity (the headline), crash count, and total harm. chicago-ranked-junctions-2016-2025.csv 23 KB 599 rows. Every junction that qualified for the study, not just the top 20, so you can look up a specific corner or check our working. DATA-PACK-README.txt This file. chicago-most-dangerous-intersections-2026-press-kit.zip All of the above in one download, if you would rather not take them individually. Available from the "Download everything" button in the map's press panel. index.html, embed.js, EMBED_SNIPPET.html The interactive map and its installation files. These are for the web team hosting the map, not for newsroom use — you do not need them to publish. The interactive map itself lives at: https://zayedlawoffices.com/maps/most-dangerous-intersections-2026/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4. HOW TO USE IT -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.1 EMBEDDING THE INTERACTIVE MAP Readers can switch it between three views — injury severity, crash count and total harm — and click any junction or neighborhood for its ten-year record. It is responsive, works on phones, and one-finger drag scrolls your page rather than panning the map, so it will not trap a mobile reader. Standard iframe. Paste the whole block; the caption carries the credit:

Chicago's most dangerous intersections, 2016-2025 · Analysis by Zayed Law Offices

One-line script, if your CMS strips iframes. This inserts the map and the credit line for you and sizes itself to your column: Both are also available inside the map itself: open it and click "Embed this map · press kit" at the bottom of the layers panel for copy-to-clipboard versions. 4.2 PUBLISHING THE IMAGES Use them as they are. Both are sized for print as well as web. Do not crop the credit bar. If you need a different crop, a transparent background, a lighter version for a print page, or the map centered on a particular neighborhood, ask — we will send it rather than have you rebuild it. 4.3 USING THE DATA FILES Both CSVs are UTF-8 with a header row and open directly in Excel, Google Sheets, R or pandas. Coordinates are WGS84 decimal degrees, so they will drop straight into any mapping tool. If you publish a figure derived from these files rather than one of ours, please still credit the dataset — and if you would like us to sanity-check a derived number before you run it, we would rather do that than see it corrected later. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5. WHAT THE NUMBERS MEAN -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE DANGER SCORE Every reported collision is weighted by its worst outcome: a fatality counts 50, an incapacitating injury 12, any other reported injury 3. Adding those gives a harm score. Harm divided by crashes gives harm per crash — the average damage a collision at that location does. The citywide figure for 2016-2025 is 0.826. Every "severity_vs_city" value is a location's harm per crash divided by that citywide figure, so 2.00 means twice the average. WHAT COUNTS AS AN INTERSECTION Junctions come from the City of Chicago Street Center Lines file (pr57-gg9e). A junction qualifies when two differently named streets meet there and at least one is a classified arterial. That keeps the ranking on corners people can name and drive, and keeps out park drives, alleys and side streets that merely absorb the crashes of a busy road beside them. All crashes within 250m of the junction are attributed to it. Where two qualifying junctions sit within 600m of each other, only the higher-ranked one is listed, so a single bad stretch of road cannot fill several places on the table. Junctions with fewer than 400 crashes across the ten years are excluded entirely — without that floor, one tragedy at a quiet corner would top the list on a sample of one. 763 junctions qualified. 599 cleared the crash floor and were ranked. THE THREE RANKINGS severity Harm per crash. The headline: how bad is a crash here. busiest Crash count. Finds the Loop and the Near North Side. volume Total harm. Where the most cumulative damage has landed, blending the other two. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6. DATA DICTIONARY -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- chicago-most-dangerous-intersections-top20.csv ranking Which of the three rankings this row belongs to rank 1-20 within that ranking intersection The named junction community_area Chicago community area it sits in severity_vs_city Harm per crash divided by the citywide average (0.826) harm_per_crash Harm score divided by crashes, unnormalized crashes Reported collisions within 250m, 2016-2025 people_injured All reported injuries seriously_injured Injuries recorded as incapacitating people_killed Fatalities harm_score fatal x50 + incapacitating x12 + other injury x3 latitude, longitude WGS84 decimal degrees chicago-ranked-junctions-2016-2025.csv latitude, longitude WGS84 decimal degrees intersection Named only for junctions in one of the top 20s; blank otherwise, because the study only names its top 20 community_area As above, blank where unnamed severity_vs_city As above crashes As above harm_score As above -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 7. SOURCES AND LIMITATIONS -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SOURCES City of Chicago Traffic Crashes - Crashes (dataset 85ca-t3if), 2016-2025: 998,271 reported collisions with usable locations inside the city, in which 1,157 people were killed, 19,323 were seriously injured and 198,730 were injured in total. Chicago Street Center Lines (dataset pr57-gg9e) for junction geometry and street classification. Both are public at data.cityofchicago.org. LIMITATIONS — please report these if you use the study These are reported crashes with usable location data. Minor collisions go unreported at different rates in different neighborhoods, which if anything makes the severity ratios on the South and West Side conservative rather than inflated. Injury severity is as recorded by the reporting officer at the scene. The 250m radius means figures describe the immediate area around a junction rather than the junction box alone. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 8. CONTACT -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Daniel Cook daniel@clixsy.com Available for interview: Adam Zayed, Founder and Managing Attorney. We can also supply the full methodology, intermediate figures, or a cut of the data for a specific neighborhood, ward or corridor on request.