================================================================================
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:

  <div style="margin:1.5rem 0">
    <iframe src="https://zayedlawoffices.com/maps/most-dangerous-intersections-2026/"
      title="Chicago's most dangerous intersections" loading="lazy"
      style="width:100%;height:660px;border:0;display:block"></iframe>
    <p style="margin:.5rem 0 0;font-size:.85rem;color:#666">Chicago's most
      dangerous intersections, 2016-2025 &middot; Analysis by
      <a href="https://zayedlawoffices.com/blog/most-dangerous-intersections-in-chicago/">Zayed Law Offices</a></p>
  </div>

One-line script, if your CMS strips iframes. This inserts the map and the
credit line for you and sizes itself to your column:

  <script src="https://zayedlawoffices.com/maps/most-dangerous-intersections-2026/embed.js" async></script>

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.
