Chicago, Illinois – Briskman Briskman & Greenberg Personal Injury & Car Accident Lawyers has published a comprehensive analysis of Chicago traffic crash data covering three full calendar years (2023–2025), drawing from approximately 331,914 crash records sourced from the City of Chicago. The firm’s Chicago car accident lawyers completed the independent study to analyze which streets pose the greatest danger to Chicago residents, which corridors are improving, and where conditions are quietly getting worse.
Awareness Saves Lives
Attorney Paul Greenberg said the firm’s goal in publishing the data is to encourage drivers to be more cautious on dangerous roads. “We hope that putting this information in front of Chicago drivers causes them to slow down and pay closer attention while driving through these areas,” Greenberg said. “If even a handful of people see that Ashland Avenue or Stony Island has become significantly more deadly and adjust how they drive on those streets, that can save lives.”
Western Avenue Remains Chicago’s Most Dangerous Street
Western Avenue recorded 3,118 crashes in 2025, maintaining its position as the city’s highest-crash corridor for the third consecutive year. The street produced 756 total injuries, including 54 incapacitating injuries, and 3 fatalities over the course of the year. One in four crashes on Western Avenue involved a driver who fled the scene. That accounts for 780 hit-and-run incidents, the highest raw count of any street in the city.
Pulaski Road ranked second with 2,477 crashes in 2025 but represents one of the clearest safety improvements in the dataset. Crashes on Pulaski dropped 15.4% from 2023 levels, and fatalities fell from 6 to 1 over the same period. Cicero Avenue (2,409 crashes) and Ashland Avenue (2,321 crashes) round out the top four by volume, though their trajectories diverge significantly.
Ashland and Stony Island Signal a South Side Fatal Car Accident Crisis
While Chicago’s overall traffic fatality count dropped 37.7% over the study period, from 151 deaths in 2023 to 94 in 2025, that improvement is not evenly distributed across the city.
Ashland Avenue recorded just 1 fatality in 2023. By 2025, that number had risen to 5, a fivefold increase as total crash counts remained relatively stable. The firm’s analysis characterizes this pattern as indicative of speed or severity changes rather than a simple volume problem.
Stony Island Avenue presents an even more abrupt shift. The corridor recorded zero fatalities in 2024 before surging to 4 in 2025. Combined with a 31.9% hit-and-run rate, the highest among major Chicago streets, Stony Island has become one of the most legally complex corridors for crash victims seeking compensation, according to attorneys at the firm. 103rd Street also recorded 2 fatalities in 2025 alongside a 14% increase in total crash volume, making it the only emerging hotspot in the study with multiple deaths.
Taken together, the South Side data points to a geographic divergence: corridors on the city’s South and Southwest sides are moving in the opposite direction from the broader citywide trend.
Hit-and-Run Car Accidents in Chicago are a Citywide Crisis
Across the 30 highest-crash streets in Chicago, hit-and-run rates ranged from 21.8% to 31.9% in 2025. The top corridors by total hit-and-run incidents were Western Avenue (780), Pulaski Road (666), Ashland Avenue (643), and Cicero Avenue (594). Across just those four streets, more than 2,700 crash victims were left without an identifiable at-fault driver in a single year.
Lethality Metrics Reveal Streets Beyond the Top 10
The study introduces a fatalities-per-1,000-crashes metric to identify streets where collisions are disproportionately likely to turn fatal, regardless of total crash volume. Under this measure, Estes Avenue ranks first in Chicago with 31.25 fatalities per 1,000 crashes in 2025, more than 30 times the rate of Western Avenue despite a fraction of the crash volume.
Lake Shore Drive Southbound stands out among high-volume streets, recording 6.44 fatalities per 1,000 crashes and 17 total deaths over the three-year study period. The combination of highway-speed traffic with urban access points makes it one of the more dangerous daily commute corridors in the city.
Emerging Hotspots Show Early Warning Signs
The analysis flags several streets posting sharp year-over-year crash increases between 2024 and 2025. Sheridan Road saw the largest absolute increase among established corridors, adding 120 crashes for a 15.9% jump. Orleans Street (+43.2%) and Huron Street (+31.6%) showed the steepest percentage increases among lower-volume streets.
The firm’s policy recommendations call for fatality-focused intervention on Ashland Avenue, Stony Island Avenue, and Marshfield Avenue; targeted enforcement and engineering on emerging hotspots; and replication of the safety interventions that have demonstrably worked on Pulaski Road, State Street, and Lake Shore Drive Northbound.
The full report and methodology on Chicago’s Most Dangerous Streets for Car Accidents is available on the firm’s website.
The attorneys at Briskman Briskman & Greenberg Personal Injury & Car Accident Lawyers have successfully represented individuals and families who have been injured or lost loved ones as a result of someone’s carelessness or a workplace accident. We have achieved success in thousands of cases, recovering millions of dollars in damages for our clients in a wide variety of cases, including personal injury, car accidents, wrongful death, medical malpractice, pharmacy errors, dog bite injuries, and work injuries.
Briskman Briskman & Greenberg Personal Injury & Car Accident Lawyers
205 W Randolph St Suite 925 Chicago, IL 60606
1 (312) 313-2414
https://www.briskmanandbriskman.com/
Press Contact : Paul Greenberg
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