The changes reshaping Chicagoland: transit projects, development, stadium moves, budgets, and what each one means for the people who live here.
The ten Chicago speed-camera locations that recorded the most violations in the year through June 29, 2026, summed from the city’s own violations dataset — led by a single camera on Ashland Avenue beside McKinley Park.
Chicago rideshare trips cost $4.21 a mile all-in in June 2026, and where the trip starts moves that number by a factor of two. The five most and least expensive pickup areas, from the city’s own trip files.
The ten busiest measured street segments in Chicago, ranked from the city’s camera-derived Average Daily Traffic feed — four of them on one stretch of Cicero Avenue.
Every license-bearing failed food inspection 2019-2024, followed to the same license's next recorded visit: 84.6% ended in a pass, 12.3% failed again, and among fails that later reached a pass the median wait was 7 days. The fast clock in Chicago enforcement - set against the building-violation ledger's slow one.
Chicago rideshare riders paid $4.21 a mile in June 2026, up from $3.81 three Junes earlier - but the fare component fell from $2.90 to $2.51. The 'additional charges' line grew from 18.2% to 34.6% of the bill, with the climb starting in mid-2025. Lincoln Park pickups run $5.51 a mile; West Pullman, $2.73.
Chicago's enforcement cameras produce a daily traffic count almost nobody reads: 2.2 million readings across 2,280 street segments this summer. On the 1,572 segments measured in both 2025 and 2026, the median changed -0.4 percent. The busiest stretch: Ontario at La Salle, 33,466 vehicles a day. Cicero Avenue owns four of the top ten.
Chicago wrote 89,021 building violations in 2019 that are marked open or complied today. Just 42.7 percent are marked complied - 24.9 percent in Englewood, 66.6 percent on the Near North Side. We mapped the complied share across every community area with at least 500 violations, for the 2019 and 2023 cohorts.
A River North office building just sold to become 70 apartments. The city permit file shows the wave it joins: 78 office-to-residential conversion permits since 2015, 35 of them since January 2024, at least 2,002 permitted homes in former office space.
A pre-registered baseline. Before the 5.5-mile extension to 130th opens, we froze the corridor's numbers - home prices, permits, licenses, 95th/Dan Ryan ridership - and published the exact list of what we will re-measure when trains run. House medians in the three higher-volume areas have at least doubled since 2019, from some of the lowest floors in the city.
EIA's own state table: Illinois average residential electricity went from 18.58 to 23.85 cents per kilowatt-hour, May 2025 to May 2026 - a 28 percent jump, the largest of the fifty states and DC, while the national average rose 6. Every sector paid more. The table doesn't say why, and neither do we.
