Chicago's 50 most-ticketed blocks.Live on one? Work on one?

What counts. Every parking ticket the City of Chicago issued from January 1, 2023 through December 31, 2025 in the Department of Finance citation records we obtained under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act — 7,445,031 of them. Speed-camera and red-light-camera tickets are left out: they measure a camera, not a curb, and one speed camera would outrank every parking block in the city. $0 warnings are left out too.

What a block is. Both sides of one hundred-block of one street, the way the ticket records it: a ticket at 1325 E 53rd St counts toward the 1300 block of E 53rd St.

Putting tickets on the map.A ticket carries a street address and nothing else — no ward, no coordinates. Each block was matched to the City's own street centerline file, which is also where the cross streets, the drawn curbs and the map itself come from. 96%of the tickets matched a real City street segment; the rest carry an address that doesn't (a typo, a missing number) and are not ranked. 30,649 blocks got at least one ticket that matched.

Fines written is the fine printed on each ticket when it was issued, before any late penalty. It is not what was paid.

Busiest hours is the three-hour window with the most tickets, from the time written on each ticket. A day, on average divides a block's tickets by all 1,096 days in the period, weekends included.

Fastest rising ranks blocks by 2025 tickets divided by 2023 tickets, among blocks with at least 1,500 tickets in 2025 and 250 in 2023, so a quiet street that went from a handful to a few dozen can't top it.

Neighborhoodsare the City's 77 community areas. A block belongs to the area that contains the middle of its street segment — the same rule our printable neighborhood guides use.

Wardsuse the 2023 ward map. Ward lines often run down the middle of a street, so each side of a block is placed on its own, and the City's centerline file says which side carries odd addresses and which even; each ticket then goes to its side's ward. 2,065 blocks are split this way. 146tickets sat just outside every ward boundary and are not in any ward's total. Because this counts tickets by street address on today's map, a ward's total here will not match ward figures the City publishes by other methods. Aldermen and contacts come from the City's Ward Offices listing.

Left out: 10000 W Ohare. 10000 W O'Hare is the single street address of O'Hare International Airport. Every curbside ticket at the terminals is written to it, so it is an airport, not a block. With its 26,472 tickets it would have ranked #2.