Chicago tracks its traffic deaths street by street. CDOT, the city's transportation department, has to publish an annual accounting of what happened, under Chapter 9-116 of the Municipal Code of Chicago1. The 2024 numbers, released in the department's fall 2025 report, show 130 people killed in traffic crashes citywide: 45 people walking, 4 people on a bike or scooter, and 81 people inside a vehicle1. Serious injuries fell to 1,896, the lowest total since 20121. That's real progress from the 2021 peak of 186 deaths, but the risk isn't spread evenly across the city, and the data shows exactly where it concentrates.
Where the crashes cluster
CDOT's newest tool for finding the worst stretches of road is the High Injury Network: 100 miles of major streets, about 10% of the city's arterial mileage, that account for 28% of everyone killed or seriously injured on major streets and 32% of the fatalities1. Forty-four percent of those miles belong to the state, not the city, because they're Illinois Department of Transportation highways running straight through Chicago neighborhoods1.
The list reads like streets most Chicagoans already drive or bike on: Milwaukee Avenue from Augusta Boulevard to Leavitt Street, Western Avenue from 74th Street to Grand Avenue, Halsted Street from Harrison Street to Division Street, Cicero Avenue from Roosevelt Road to Addison Street, Ashland Avenue from 79th Street to Pershing Road, and a run of South Side corridors that includes Cottage Grove Avenue, Stony Island Avenue, Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, and 79th Street between Halsted and Yates Boulevard1. CDOT's severe-crash heat map shows the heaviest concentrations downtown around the Loop, Near North Side, and Near West Side, on the West Side in Austin, West Garfield Park, East Garfield Park, and North Lawndale, and on the South Side in Greater Grand Crossing, Auburn Gresham, and Avalon Park1.
Two corridors CDOT is watching closely
Brighton Park shows how much two streets can dominate a neighborhood's crash toll. CDOT found Archer Avenue and Kedzie Avenue together account for 36% of all traffic deaths in Brighton Park and 57% of the people seriously hurt or killed while walking or biking there1. Sixty percent of the crashes on Archer Avenue trace back to turning movements, the result of a corridor with too few left-turn lanes and cars stopping in the travel lane to reach local businesses. Forty percent of the intersections along Archer and Kedzie didn't even have a marked crosswalk before CDOT's redesign work began there1.
Milwaukee Avenue tells a more hopeful story. The stretch from Ogden Avenue to Logan Boulevard was flagged as a High Crash Corridor in Chicago's original 2017 Vision Zero plan, and years of protected bike lanes, bus boarding islands, and curb bump-outs have since cut severe crashes there by 52%1. Between Western Avenue and California Avenue specifically, dooring crashes (a cyclist hit by a car door swinging open into their path) dropped 85% after the redesign went in1. Illinois law already banned opening a car door into moving traffic without checking first, under 625 ILCS 5/11-1407, but a protected lane makes that legal duty far easier for drivers to actually follow2.
Why these crashes turn fatal
Two patterns explain most of the severity. The first is speed and vehicle size. In 2024, 72% of Chicago's traffic fatalities involved a vehicle traveling at high speed, and 60% of the pedestrians killed were struck by an SUV or a larger vehicle1. A street wider than 50 feet sees 16 times more traffic deaths per mile than a narrower one, since width invites speed1. National research backs up the vehicle-size finding. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety studied nearly 18,000 pedestrian crashes and found that pickups, SUVs, and vans with hoods taller than 40 inches were about 45% more likely to kill a pedestrian than lower, sloped vehicles, and a blunt, vertical front end added another 26% on top of that3.
The second pattern is driver behavior. Reckless driving, drivers running red lights or jumping curbs, factored into 85% of Chicago's severe crashes in 2024, and a quarter of all fatalities involved someone disregarding a stop sign or signal1.
Who bears the risk
The danger isn't spread evenly across people, either. Using federal crash data from 2019 through 2022, CDOT found Black Chicagoans were three times more likely to die in a traffic crash than other residents, and that gap hasn't closed1. Nearly half of 2024's fatalities, 48%, happened in communities the city classifies as facing high mobility and economic hardship1. Age matters too: residents 70 and older are 4.5 times more likely than the rest of the population to be fatally struck while walking, the highest pedestrian fatality rate of any age group in the city1.
Zoom out to the state, and the pattern holds. Illinois recorded 4,832 pedestrian crashes in 2024, 214 of them fatal, with 217 pedestrian deaths statewide. Bicyclists were involved in 3,413 crashes, 37 of them fatal4. Cook County alone logged 164,559 total crashes and 333 fatal crashes that year, more than any other Illinois county by a wide margin4. Nationally, the Governors Highway Safety Association projects 7,148 pedestrian deaths in 2024, down 4.3% from 2023 but still 19.2% above the 2016 level, and its analysis of federal crash data found 65% of pedestrian deaths happened in locations without a sidewalk5.
The rules that are supposed to protect you
Illinois gives cyclists specific legal protections that matter on streets like these. A driver overtaking a bicyclist must leave at least 3 feet of space and hold that distance until safely past, under 625 ILCS 5/11-7036. The same statute makes it a Class A misdemeanor, or a Class 3 felony if someone is seriously hurt, to drive recklessly close to a bicyclist or pedestrian6.
None of that changes what happens in the moment a crash occurs on Archer Avenue or under the tracks on Milwaukee. If you or someone you love was hit while walking or biking in Chicago, the specific intersection and corridor matter for figuring out what went wrong: a missing crosswalk, an uncontrolled turn lane, or a driver who never should have been going that fast. An attorney who knows the local crash data can put it to use. You can start by browsing the legal directory for attorneys who handle these cases in Chicago.
This is general information, not legal advice.
Sources
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Chicago Department of Transportation, "Chicago Traffic Crashes: Annual Report," published Fall 2025. https://api.chicago.gov/filenet5/servlets/getDocumentContent?applicationId=CompleteStreets&documentId=%7B805EE69A-0000-C518-8777-D32746FEA322%7D
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Illinois Compiled Statutes, 625 ILCS 5/11-1407, Illinois Vehicle Code (opening and closing vehicle doors). https://www.ilga.gov/documents/legislation/ilcs/documents/062500050k11-1407.htm
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Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, "Vehicles with higher, more vertical front ends pose greater risk to pedestrians," November 14, 2023. https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/vehicles-with-higher-more-vertical-front-ends-pose-greater-risk-to-pedestrians
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Illinois Department of Transportation, "2024 Illinois Crash Facts & Statistics," published January 1, 2026. https://idot.illinois.gov/content/dam/soi/en/web/idot/documents/transportation-system/resources/safety/crash-reports/crash-facts/2024-crash-facts.pdf
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Governors Highway Safety Association, "Pedestrian Traffic Fatalities by State: 2024 Preliminary Data," published July 2025. https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2025-07/Pedestrian%20Traffic%20Fatalities%20by%20State%20-%202024%20Data%20-%207.10.25.pdf
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Illinois Compiled Statutes, 625 ILCS 5/11-703, Illinois Vehicle Code (overtaking a bicycle). https://www.ilga.gov/documents/legislation/ilcs/documents/062500050k11-703.htm