Query the City of Chicago's open-data Towed Vehicles dataset via the Socrata (SODA) API to check whether a vehicle was towed or impounded by the city
domain: data.cityofchicago.org · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Identify the dataset's Socrata resource ID (ygr5-vcbg) from the Towed Vehicles dataset page on the Chicago Data Portal.
Send a GET request to the SODA endpoint https://data.cityofchicago.org/resource/ygr5-vcbg.json (CSV and XML export variants also exist) to retrieve records.
Filter results with SoQL query parameters, e.g. $where on plate or tow date fields, or $q for full-text search, plus $limit/$offset for pagination.
Register a free Socrata application token via the Chicago Data Portal and pass it in the X-App-Token header to avoid the lower unauthenticated rate limit.
Parse the JSON response fields (inventory number, tow date, make, style, color, plate, pound address/phone) returned by the API.
Known gotchas
The dataset only covers vehicles towed/relocated by the City of Chicago itself (Police, Streets & Sanitation, Revenue, Aviation, City Clerk); it explicitly excludes vehicles towed by private towing companies.
It's a rolling 90-day window of records, not a permanent archive — older tow records drop off and are not retrievable through this endpoint.
Unauthenticated requests are throttled much harder than token-authenticated ones, so production/bulk polling requires registering an app token.
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