Chicago Traffic Accidents: The Most Dangerous Intersections

Ask which intersection in Chicago is the most dangerous and you will get confident answers. Most of them are guesses.

So we stopped guessing. We pulled every crash record the City of Chicago has published since January 2022 — 510,049 crashes, of which 112,113 were flagged by the reporting officer as intersection-related — and ranked them. What came back was more interesting than the list we expected, and it starts with a caution that most articles on this subject skip.

A crash count is not a danger rating. The busiest junction in Chicago will collect the most crashes whether or not it is unusually hazardous for any individual driver passing through it. Six lanes of traffic and tens of thousands of vehicles a day will out-crash a quiet residential corner every time, and that tells you about volume, not about risk. Traffic engineers control for this by dividing crashes by the number of vehicles entering the intersection. The public crash data does not include those traffic counts, so neither this study nor any other one built from the same source can honestly claim to have found the “most dangerous” corner in the city.

What the data can tell you is where crashes concentrate, what kind of crashes they are, what causes them, and when they happen. That turns out to be a lot.

How we did this

We queried the City of Chicago’s Traffic Crashes – Crashes dataset (Chicago Data Portal identifier 85ca-t3if) directly through its public API on August 19, 2026. The study window runs from January 1, 2022 through August 19, 2026, covering 510,049 Chicago crashes. An intersection crash is one where the reporting officer set the intersection-related field to “Y” — 112,113 crashes, or 22.0% of the total.

One quirk of the data shaped everything that follows. Chicago records each crash against a single street address, not against a pair of cross streets. A crash at 79th and Stony Island might be filed at “7900 S Stony Island Ave” or at “1600 E 79th St” depending on which approach the reporting officer used. A single junction can therefore appear many times in the raw data under different addresses, each holding a fraction of its real total.

County, statewide and suburban figures come from the Illinois Department of Transportation — its statewide geocoded crash service, Illinois Crash Facts 2024, and the Crash Trends 2020–2024 report. DuPage County context comes from the DuPage County Safety Action Plan published by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning in June 2025.

The full limitations are set out at the end. All of it is public, so anyone who wants to check this can.

Chicago’s highest-crash intersections

Intersection-related crashes, January 2022 through August 2026.

#	Intersection	Neighborhood	Crashes
1	79th St / Stony Island Ave / South Chicago Ave	Avalon Park / South Shore	282
2	Pershing Rd (39th St) & Western Ave	McKinley Park	129
3	95th St & Stony Island Ave	Calumet Heights	95
4	87th St & Stony Island Ave	Calumet Heights	87
5	87th St & State St	Chatham	78
6	87th St & Ashland Ave	Auburn Gresham	74
7	95th St & Halsted St	Washington Heights	72
8	87th St & Vincennes Ave	Chatham	69
9	75th St & Lafayette Ave	Greater Grand Crossing	69
10	87th St & Cottage Grove Ave	Chatham / Avalon Park	66

Two high-volume locations are excluded because they are not street intersections in any ordinary sense: the O’Hare Airport terminal roadway system (128 crashes) and the Lake Shore Drive ramp junction at 57th Street and Hayes Drive (80). Both would otherwise place in the top five.

That exclusion is a judgement call, and it is not perfectly clean. Several entries further down the list — locations on Lafayette Avenue, Wentworth Avenue and Wells Street in the 4300–8700 South range — sit along the Dan Ryan Expressway corridor and may also be ramp terminals rather than ordinary surface corners. We have not verified them location by location, so they remain in the ranking.

The finding that complicates the ranking — and what it says about the data

We originally wrote this section to report that Chicago’s highest-crash junction had recorded no deaths during our study window. That was wrong, and how it was wrong turned out to be the more interesting story.

One person has died at this junction during our window. On December 26, 2024, a 77-year-old man was struck and killed in a hit-and-run while crossing at 1551 East 79th Street — inside the intersection footprint, roughly 17 metres from the address record we had been treating as “the” junction. The contributory cause was recorded as disregarding traffic signals. A driver was arrested in March 2026.

We missed it because we queried the junction by street address, and Chicago’s crash data fragments this single intersection across roughly 25 different address records. On 79th Street alone, crashes at this junction are filed under 1425, 1427, 1550, 1551, 1559, 1599, 1600, 1633, 1700 and 1736. Querying three of those addresses and concluding there were no deaths was a methodology failure on our part. The correct approach is a geographic radius search, which returns every fatal crash near the junction regardless of how it was coded.

The more useful finding is what happened when we checked that answer against the city’s official records. The crash dataset and the Chicago Department of Transportation’s Vision Zero fatality register do not agree about this intersection, in both directions:

• The crash dataset misses a death. On July 28, 2021, the official register records a driver fatality at 7899 S Stony Island. The open crash dataset codes that same crash as zero fatalities, most severe injury “incapacitating.” Local coverage at the time described four people injured, two critically, with no deaths reported yet. This is the classic delayed-death problem — a victim dies after the crash report is filed, and the original record is never updated.
• The crash dataset may add one that did not happen. A double fatality recorded on May 1, 2020 at this junction appears nowhere in the official register, drew no news coverage we could find, and is coded as a same-direction sideswipe caused by vehicle equipment. We are not confident it occurred as recorded.

So the honest count is roughly one death at this junction during our window and about two in the two years before it — and the underlying dataset is not reliable enough at the individual-intersection level to state that with real confidence. Anyone building a “deadliest intersection” ranking from the fatality field alone, and several published rankings do exactly that, is building on a field that demonstrably undercounts at the one location we checked hardest.

The broader pattern still holds, and it is the part worth keeping. Fatal crashes in Chicago do not concentrate at particular corners; they are spread thin across the network. That is why we are not publishing a deadliest-intersection ranking, and why we would treat any that you see with caution.

Why the South Side dominates the list

All ten sit on the South Side, with the single exception of Pershing and Western in McKinley Park on the Southwest Side, and they are not randomly scattered. They fall along three east–west arterials — 79th, 87th and 95th Streets — and one north–south corridor, Stony Island Avenue. Widening to the top 25, Stony Island Avenue alone appears four times: at 71st, 79th, 87th and 95th.

These are wide, high-capacity commercial arterials with frequent signalized crossings and many turning movements. That pattern is consistent with the crash profile the data shows, though we should be careful about how firmly we state it: this dataset contains no traffic counts, so we are describing road type rather than demonstrating a volume effect. It is a road-design pattern, and readers should be careful not to read a neighborhood ranking into it.

What kind of crashes happen at intersections

Intersection crashes are a different mix from crashes generally.

Crash type	Share at intersections	Share of all crashes
Turning	32.0%	15.0%
Angle	26.7%	10.9%
Rear end	16.9%	19.9%
Sideswipe, same direction	9.2%	16.1%
Pedestrian	4.5%	2.5%
Pedalcyclist	3.0%	2.0%
Parked vehicle	2.1%	22.8%
Fixed object	1.9%	4.4%
Head on	0.9%	0.8%

Turning and angle collisions together account for 58.7% of intersection crashes — against 25.9% of crashes citywide. These are the side-impact conflicts, and a vehicle’s side offers far less structural protection than its front or rear.

That mix matters for rideshare passengers in particular. Rideshare trips concentrate pickups, drop-offs and turning movements at exactly these junctions, and a passenger in the back seat of a turning vehicle has no control over the conflict. Liability questions in those cases can involve the driver, the other motorist, and the platform’s insurance policy at once — which is why claims involving Lyft and Uber often turn on facts a police report alone does not settle.

Intersections are also disproportionately where people outside vehicles get hurt. They are 22% of Chicago crashes, but 38.6% of every pedestrian crash and 34.0% of every bicycle crash in the city happens at one.

What causes them

Primary cause	Share of intersection crashes with a determined cause
Failing to yield right-of-way	32.7%
Following too closely	10.9%
Disregarding traffic signals	10.8%
Improper turning / no signal	9.1%
Failing to reduce speed to avoid crash	6.7%
Improper overtaking / passing	6.2%
Driving skills / knowledge / experience	4.3%
Disregarding stop sign	4.1%
Improper lane usage	4.0%
Weather	1.9%

Percentages exclude the 36,675 records where police could not determine a cause — roughly a third of all intersection crashes, which is itself worth knowing.

Failure to yield the right of way is the largest identified cause by a wide margin — three times the share of following too closely. Add signal violations (10.8%) and stop-sign violations (4.1%) and nearly half of all determined-cause intersection crashes come down to a driver proceeding when it was not their turn.

Weather, incidentally, accounts for 1.9% of intersection crashes where a cause was determined — 1.3% of all intersection crashes. Not the dominant factor it is often assumed to be.

When they happen

The peak is not when most people expect.

Time window	Intersection crashes
3:00–4:00 p.m. (peak hour)	8,831
4:00–5:00 p.m.	8,561
5:00–6:00 p.m.	8,422
8:00–9:00 a.m. (morning peak)	6,580
4:00–5:00 a.m. (safest hour)	1,151

The single worst hour is 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. — the leading edge of the afternoon peak rather than its center. The dataset does not record why, so we would not push an explanation further than that. The three-hour window from 3 to 6 p.m. holds 25,814 crashes, 23.0% of the total in three of twenty-four hours. The 4 a.m. hour is 7.7 times safer than the 3 p.m. hour.

By day of week, Friday is the peak at 16.2% of intersection crashes; Sunday is lowest at 12.3%. The weekday spread is narrower than most people assume — Tuesday through Saturday all sit between 14.3% and 16.2%.

The suburban picture is shaped differently

Ori Law Group represents injured people across Cook, DuPage, Will and Kane Counties, so we pulled the same measure for all four.

County	Total crashes (2024)	Intersection-related	Share	Fatal crashes	Injury crashes
Cook	164,564	46,119	28.0%	333	31,456
DuPage	17,325	7,057	40.7%	54	3,783
Will	13,570	5,442	40.1%	56	2,972
Kane	10,445	5,000	47.9%	29	2,589
Four-county total	205,904	63,618	30.9%	472	40,800

These four counties account for 67.8% of all crashes in Illinois — 205,904 of 303,913.

The striking number is the intersection share. In Chicago, intersections are 22% of crashes. In Kane County they are nearly half.

Part of that gap is plausibly real: suburban arterials are wider and faster, with long uninterrupted stretches between widely spaced signalized junctions, so a larger proportion of the total conflict happens at the intersections themselves. Part of it is a reporting artifact — different police agencies apply the intersection flag differently, and we would not present this as a clean like-for-like comparison. A gap of that size is unlikely to be entirely definitional, but we cannot say how much of it is real.

One further caution: it is tempting to subtract Chicago’s crashes from Cook County’s to estimate a suburban-Cook figure. We have not published that number, because the county totals come from IDOT and the Chicago totals from the city’s own portal — two different collection universes — and subtracting one from the other produces a result that looks precise and is not.

For Oak Brook specifically: the village recorded 789 crashes in 2024, of which 206 (26.1%) were intersection-related.

The DuPage County Safety Action Plan also ranks neighboring Oakbrook Terrace highest in the county for fatal and serious-injury crashes per 100,000 residents, at 841.6. We would not lean on that figure. Oakbrook Terrace has roughly 2,100 residents and an enormous daytime population moving through its retail and office corridors, so a per-resident rate there measures the mismatch between who lives somewhere and who drives through it far more than it measures road danger.

The trend is genuinely good

Year	Chicago crashes	Persons injured	Serious injuries	Fatalities
2022	108,412	22,093	2,287	150
2023	110,754	23,461	2,225	151
2024	112,057	25,706	1,931	123
2025	109,118	24,958	1,710	93

Chicago traffic deaths fell 24.4% in 2025, from 123 to 93 — the lowest in this dataset’s reliable history. Serious injuries fell 11.4%. Total crashes fell only 2.6%, meaning the improvement is in severity, not in the number of collisions.

Statewide the direction differs. Illinois recorded 303,913 crashes in 2024 — up 1.6% on 2023 — with 89,023 people injured, up 1.7%. But fatalities fell 5.0% to 1,178, the lowest of the past five years. Illinois pedestrian deaths in 2024: 217, from 4,832 pedestrian crashes. Cyclist deaths: 37, from 3,413 crashes.

So statewide, more crashes and fewer deaths; in Chicago, slightly fewer crashes and considerably fewer deaths. What the two have in common is that severity is falling faster than frequency.

What this data cannot tell you

Any study is only as good as its stated limits, so here are ours.

It is an exposure ranking, not a risk ranking. Without traffic volume counts, crashes per vehicle entering the intersection cannot be calculated. A high-volume junction will always rank high. This is the biggest single caveat and it applies to every published ranking built from this dataset.

Address fragmentation means our totals are floors. We initially treated the top junction as three address records. It is closer to 25. Crash and injury totals in this study are therefore lower bounds, and by a wider margin than we first assumed. A geographic radius query, not address matching, is the correct method.

The intersection flag is incomplete. For 2022–2025 the field reads “Y” on 97,348 records, “N” on 5,023, and is blank on 337,970. It is a positive flag, not a full classification, so every intersection count here is a lower bound.

Per-location severity counts are too small to rank, and the fatality field is unreliable. The highest serious-injury count at any single address is 7 over four and a half years. Worse, we verified that the dataset’s fatality field disagrees with the city’s official register at the one junction we checked hardest — in both directions. We have not published a severity or fatality ranking by location, and we would treat any that you see with caution.

Early years in this dataset are unusable. Electronic crash reporting was phased in across Chicago police districts between 2013 and 2017, so record counts from those years reflect the rollout rather than real crash volume. Any statistic claiming crashes have risen dramatically “since 2016” using this source is an artifact, not a finding.

Minor crashes are undercounted. Illinois requires a report only where there is an injury or apparent property damage above a statutory threshold.

2026 is a partial year and should not be annualized or compared to complete years.

The data is officer-reported and subject to transcription and geocoding error.

What actually reduces intersection risk

The causes data points somewhere specific. Failure to yield, signal violations and stop-sign violations together account for close to half of all determined-cause intersection crashes — about a third of all intersection crashes once the undetermined third is included. Right-of-way errors, not straight-line speed, are the largest identified category.

That reframes the usual advice. General safety guidance for high-volume intersections tends to emphasize:

• Treating a green light as a permission, not a guarantee. With turning and angle collisions at 58.7% of intersection crashes, the risk is usually a vehicle entering from a direction you have the right of way over.
• Extra caution on left turns, where a driver is judging an oncoming vehicle’s speed and distance simultaneously.
• Watching for pedestrians and cyclists in the crosswalk on every turn — over a third of all pedestrian and cyclist crashes in Chicago happen at intersections.
• Awareness that mid-afternoon is the highest-crash window, not just the evening rush.
• Understanding that a wide, busy arterial junction produces a different crash type than a residential corner: more frequent, generally lower-speed, side-impact conflicts.

None of that eliminates risk created by another driver. In 22% of all intersection crashes — 32.7% of those where a cause was determined — police identified a failure to yield by someone, and the person injured is not necessarily the person who failed to yield.

If you are involved in a crash at an intersection

General information on what typically happens after a collision:

1. Move to safety where it is possible to do so, and check on anyone involved.
2. Call police. Illinois requires a report where there is injury or property damage above the statutory threshold, and the officer’s report becomes part of the record — including the intersection-related flag and contributory-cause field this study is built on.
3. Document the scene. Photographs of vehicle positions, signals, signage, sight lines and road conditions. At an intersection, the geometry itself is often relevant.
4. Exchange information with other drivers, and note contact details for any witnesses.
5. Seek medical attention. Symptoms from side-impact collisions in particular do not always present immediately.
6. Keep records of medical treatment, time missed from work, and communications with insurers.

Intersection crashes frequently involve disputes about who had the right of way, which is why the police report, any traffic-camera footage, and independent witnesses tend to carry weight. Illinois applies modified comparative negligence, meaning fault can be apportioned between parties — a general feature of Illinois law, and one reason accounts of the same collision often differ sharply.

How Ori Law Group can help

Ori Law Group is a women-owned personal injury trial firm based in Oak Brook, representing injured people across Cook, DuPage, Will and Kane Counties. Intersection collisions frequently turn on right-of-way and comparative fault — questions the police report, physical evidence and witness accounts all bear on. If you were injured in a car accident or any other intersection collision, you can reach the firm at (312) 621-0000 for a free consultation.

Nothing on this page is legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. It is general information about publicly available crash data. Every collision turns on its own facts, and anyone with questions about a specific situation should speak with a lawyer about it directly.

Data sources: City of Chicago Traffic Crashes dataset (85ca-t3if), accessed August 19, 2026 · Chicago Department of Transportation Vision Zero traffic fatality records · Illinois Department of Transportation, Illinois Crash Facts 2024 and Crash Trends 2020–2024 · DuPage County Safety Action Plan, Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, June 2025. Journalists and researchers may request the underlying analysis by contacting the firm.