Data story · Transportation and safety
When and where do traffic crashes happen in Evanston?
The City recorded 9,472 crashes between October 2016 and December 2021. They peak on Fridays and in the afternoon, and a handful of main roads carry a large share of them.
- 1,754
- crashes a year on average (2017–2021)
- Ridge
- street with the most crashes (761)
- 1,534 vs 950
- crashes on Fridays vs Sundays
Every crash Evanston police respond to is logged with its date, time, street and a contributing circumstance. The City publishes these records on its open data portal as a table. We grouped them by time and by street to see when crashes cluster, and where.
Busy streets see more crashes simply because they’re long and carry more traffic, so we also compare streets by crashes per kilometer of road.
Crashes by day of the week
Crashes by hour of the day
The busiest hour is 4 p.m. to 5 p.m., with 831 crashes over the whole period.
Crashes by year
* Partial year: the records start in October 2016 and end in December 2021. Crashes fell in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, and stayed lower in 2021.
Crashes per kilometer of street
Hover a street.
Top 10 streets
- Ridge761
- Dempster583
- Howard524
- Chicago486
- Main474
- Dodge472
- Oakton383
- Asbury374
- Central360
- Church323
What the records say about causes
- Failing to reduce speed to avoid crash2,078
- Failing to yield right-of-way1,629
- Improper backing732
- Improper lane usage423
- Driving skills/knowledge/experience352
- Improper overtaking/passing343
- Improper turning/no signal340
A further 1,728 crashes (18%) are recorded as “unable to determine”.
Read with care
- Most records have no map coordinates (84%) and no police beat (83%), so crashes are placed on streets by name, not at exact spots.
- Name matching places 95% of crashes on a street. A crash at an intersection is counted on the street it was recorded against.
- Crashes per km show where crashes are dense, not risk per driver: there’s no traffic-volume data here.
- The table stops in December 2021; newer crashes aren’t published on the portal.
How we worked this out
- Sources: Evanston Traffic Crashes (2016 to 2021) (9,472 records) and Street centerlines, both published by the City of Evanston.
- Crash street names have their suffix removed (“RIDGE AV” becomes Ridge) and are matched to street names in the centerlines layer. Street length is the total length of that street’s centerlines.
- The figures are computed from the published data when this site is built, not typed in by hand.