Historical Public Chauffeur License Records from Chicago

Historical records of public chauffeur licenses issued by the City of Chicago, intended for reference rather than current status. The dataset includes versioned records with a Last Valid Date and Record Version ID to track changes over time. It is published by data.cityofchicago.org and was last updated in April 2026.

Use Cases

• Analyze license renewal rates and status changes over time using the Status, Status Date, and Renewed columns.
• Model the geographic distribution of licensed chauffeurs using the Chauffeur City and Chauffeur State columns.
• Track the historical validity periods of licenses using the Original Issue Date, Last Valid Date, and Expires columns.
• Identify patterns in license types and driver types (License Type, Driver Type) across different demographic segments (Sex).
• Study the impact of a source system change in November 2018 on license record consistency using the Last Valid Date column.

Strengths

• Includes version tracking for license records via Record Version ID and Last Valid Date columns.
• Contains multiple key license attributes such as License Type, Status, and Expires for analysis.

Limitations

• Records between November 19 and 21, 2018 are noted as unreliable due to a source system change.
• The Last Valid Date column may be artificially late, and intervening record versions may be missing.
• The Expires column is absent from records created before a system migration.

Provenance

Source

data.cityofchicago.org

Collection Method

Extracted from city licensing systems, with versioning applied to create a historical record.

Time Range

Historical records up to the point of archival; specific start date unknown.

Freshness

null

Geography

Chicago, Illinois, United States.