Chicago potholes
The data behind Chicago potholes over time: what the City’s own records show about pothole reports, how long they take to close, and how much patching gets done, by community area and ward.
01 Coverage
Pothole records from 2019 to 2026-08, in full calendar years and in Jan 1–Aug 31 windows, so 2026 can be set beside the same months of earlier years. They cover Chicago as a whole, its 77 community areas, its 50 wards on the 2023 boundaries, and census tracts grouped by poverty rate and by majority race or ethnicity. 2019 stays in the download but enters no comparison anywhere in the release, and the project’s map starts at 2020.
02 Files
| File | Rows | Bytes | SHA-256 |
|---|---|---|---|
| breaks.json | — | 17,505 | 3fe5587632c7042b70742bae9dd3fecf37a4834f7fd3507b361d27b63ae2540f |
| change_summary.csv | 27 | 1,880 | c90f775f56afb660c63de1a2bc5c47de8aeb65d860e97155232853a881a701d5 |
| community_area_summary.csv | 77 | 5,960 | 928d23658dc26de4f15288bdcd8ae7033a2f591aba788b63ae4e0e380d035b23 |
| facts.json | — | 18,684 | 72c70b4f36e6152ffbfe3104167d7b54649e8dafc3d8a7ad6aa4ad68edfffc26 |
| geo_denominators.csv | 143 | 16,744 | 347be85a0051a66ae4a018d2a62e95561b18d5bca301044f90f29ac029b52bcb |
| potholes_long.csv | 77,274 | 5,366,172 | 5dc055391ee602fad4124ae0d9aa4c56fae92f34abfd3f93cfd95bb671ced481 |
| qa_report.json | — | 37,087 | 7dafa1fb739b059c1594f8d9c4fa4844831de209a92d996d52b15f66c0c15210 |
| strata_tracts.csv | 799 | 47,466 | b921096a2e490f07b0254a3f1adc61861e72a124a7791ebf7a98ecaeb266df4b |
| ward_legacy_mix.csv | 2,437 | 54,388 | 19c1139dd2767f4ffecd4ce087dbaced4c53ea8eb63167d4fb7c498064addb6d |
| ward_summary.csv | 50 | 3,759 | c4ccb5bc54289b2eaed2041fc1e90ae2fd5106ea2924c19c87f5d259cbb04c13 |
| winter_harshness.csv | 8 | 951 | 29dcaa6172bc3d3dad69c8aa124d33a483bedd1c887d72529095ee321c501f54 |
| winter_reference_stats.json | — | 1,580 | f5715bfefe014c4a3376c4dea2a08a63194a70c9c9d1eb4757ea678ee708d801 |
| winter_sensitivity.csv | 56 | 1,555 | 323a5d31835c34d1e08b1332ff13cb4eac9fce91419150602140f2cc361065a7 |
Every column is defined in the release’s data dictionary ↗.
03 Sources
04 Limitations
More reports per street mile is not more potholes per street mile, and a closed 311 report is not a patched pothole. Reports measure attention; fills measure work. Neither measures pavement.
- What these numbers are — and what they are not
- More reports does not mean more potholes
- Closing a report is not patching a pothole
- Fill counts are crew-entered
- Suppression and class breaks
- Wards, the 2023 remap, and alderpersons
- Geography, roads and coverage
- Why 2019 is excluded from the map
- The winter score is context, not a correction
- 2026 is not over
- Validation
05 License and citation
Data and documentation are licensed under CC BY 4.0. The release ships no code of its own; the map’s vendored libraries, d3 and topojson-client, keep their ISC licenses. The underlying City of Chicago, Census Bureau and NOAA records remain subject to their publishers’ terms.
- Public release ↗ Chicago-Potholes
- Data dictionary & limitations ↗ Chicago-Potholes
- Project methodology ↗ Chicago-Potholes
- checksums.sha256 published manifest
Blandford, Connor Ulrich. “Chicago potholes.” Data set, release 2026-09-26. connorblandford.com. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22972212. All releases: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22972211.