Historical Chicago Public Passenger Vehicle License Records

Historical records from Chicago's public passenger vehicle licensing system, capturing past states of licenses before updates. The dataset includes two additional version-tracking columns, Last Valid Date and Record Version ID, appended to the standard license record format. It is maintained by data.cityofchicago.org and reflects a source system change from November 2018.

Use Cases

• Analyze temporal patterns in license Status changes using the Last Valid Date column.
• Study the distribution of Vehicle Type (e.g., taxi, limo) and Taxi Affiliation over time.
• Investigate correlations between Vehicle Model Year, Vehicle Fuel Source, and Wheelchair Accessible status.
• Track company-level changes by joining records on Company Name and Public Vehicle Number.
• Identify version history for specific licenses using the Record ID and Record Version ID fields.

Strengths

• Includes version history tracking via Last Valid Date and Record Version ID columns.
• Contains 19 columns detailing vehicle specs, company info, license status, and location.

Limitations

• Records may have an artificially late Last Valid Date due to technical limitations, with possible gaps in version history.
• All licenses appear updated on 11/19/2018 or 11/20/2018 due to a source system change, limiting precise temporal analysis around that date.
• Unknown row count and sample size prevent assessment of statistical significance.

Provenance

Source

data.cityofchicago.org

Collection Method

Archived records from the city's Public Passenger Vehicle Licenses system.

Time Range

Historical records up to a source system change in November 2018.

Freshness

Data is historical and not current; last platform update was 2026-04-03.

Geography

City of Chicago, Illinois, USA.