The City towed 405 cars off Ward 18's blocks.#45 of Chicago's 50 wards.

The records. City of Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation tow records, obtained under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act, request F136267 (released April 21, 2026). The release is one spreadsheet holding two different tables: the Department of Streets and Sanitation's tow inventory (51,034parking tows counted here) and its “Immediate Tow” service requests (31,588). They use different record numbers and mostly cover different tows, so both are counted. Where a request and an inventory record are on the same block on the same day, with the car reaching the pound within three hours of the request, they are counted once: 795 requests were matched that way.

What counts.Parking tows only — tow zones, hazards, the winter overnight parking ban, boots, cars for sale on the street, abandoned vehicles, game-day tow zones and the like, labeled here in plain words from the City's reason codes. Police tows (26,232 — stolen cars, arrests, DUI impoundments) are left out: their address is usually the police station, not the curb. Tows from January 1, 2025 through March 27, 2026, the last day in the release — 82,622 in all.

What a block is. Both sides of one hundred-block of one street, the way the tow record gives the address: a tow at 1325 N Milwaukee Ave counts toward the 1300 block of N Milwaukee Ave.

Putting tows on the map.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. 95%of the tows matched a real City street segment; the rest carry an address that doesn't and are not ranked. 13,330 blocks had at least one tow that matched.

A week, on average divides a block's tows by the NaN weeks in the period.

Fastest rising compares January 1–March 27, 2026 with the same days of 2025, among blocks with at least 60 tows in 2026 and 15 in 2025, and lists those that grew at least 1.5-fold.

What happens to the caris the status on the tow inventory as of the City's April 2026 release, for cars towed in 2025. The immediate-tow table records no outcome.

Neighborhoodsare the City's 77 community areas; a block belongs to the area containing the middle of its street segment. A neighborhood gets its own page when its most-towed block had at least 25 tows.

Wardsuse the 2023 ward map, placed by location: each side of a block is placed in a ward, and a tow's odd or even street number picks its side. 360 blocks have tows in two wards this way; 7 tows fell just outside every ward. The immediate-tow records carry their own ward, which agrees with this placement for 97%of tows. The inventory's ward column agrees for only 19%— most of its rows say Ward 1 — so it isn't used. Aldermen and contacts come from the City's Ward Offices listing.

Left out: 10000 W O'Hare. The airport is one address in the records, not a street block. With its 97 tows it would have ranked #106.