Chicago Towed Vehicle Inventory from the Last 90 Days

Towed vehicle records from the City of Chicago, including vehicles impounded by city departments for illegal parking, abandonment, or illegal activity. The dataset is provided by data.cityofchicago.org and was last updated on 2026-04-03. It includes location, vehicle details, and tow process information for incidents within the last 90 days.

Use Cases

• Analyze temporal patterns of towing activity using Tow Date and time-series methods.
• Identify common vehicle makes and models involved in towing incidents using Make, Model, and Style columns.
• Map tow destinations and potential geographic clusters using Towed to Address for spatial analysis.
• Trace specific vehicle impoundment cases by linking Plate, State, and Inventory Number for record lookup.

Strengths

• Includes 10 specific columns detailing vehicle attributes, location, and tow process.
• Data is updated to reflect towing events from the last 90 days, providing recent coverage.
• Published by an official city source (data.cityofchicago.org) via the Socrata platform.

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• The dataset excludes vehicles towed by private companies, presenting an incomplete view of all towing activity.

Provenance

Source

data.cityofchicago.org

Collection Method

Collected by city departments (Chicago Police, Streets and Sanitation, Revenue, Aviation, City Clerk) during tow and impound operations.

Time Range

Covers the 90 days preceding the last update date.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-03 21:16:26; freshness should be verified.

Geography

City of Chicago, Illinois, USA.