Public Passenger Vehicle Licenses — Chicago

A public passenger vehicle is a vehicle used for the transportation of passengers for hire by a public chauffeur. The list of public passenger vehicles includes licensed taxicabs (medallions), liveries, ambulances, medicars, charter-sightseeing buses, horse-drawn carriages, and pedicabs. This Actor returns it as one flat JSON row per record, with 17 declared fields — typed, named and documented in the dataset schema, so a spreadsheet or an agent can use it without guessing.

What you get

Field	Type	Meaning
state	string	State
status	string	Status
taxi_affiliation	string	Taxi Affiliation
address	string	Address
vehicle_model_year	number	Vehicle Model Year
record_id	string	Record ID
city	string	City
wheelchair_accessible	string	Wheelchair Accessible
vehicle_type	string	Vehicle Type
vehicle_color	string	Vehicle Color
public_vehicle_number	number	Public Vehicle Number
vehicle_fuel_source	string	Vehicle Fuel Source
company_name	string	Company Name
vehicle_make	string	Vehicle Make
vehicle_model	string	Vehicle Model
zip_code	number	ZIP Code
taxi_medallion_license_management	string	Taxi Medallion License Management

Every row also carries sourceRowId, sourceUpdatedAt and scrapedAt, so a pipeline can tell one record from another and know exactly when it was read.

{
  "state": "IL",
  "status": "INACTIVE",
  "taxi_affiliation": "Flash Cab Co",
  "address": "2350 W. OGDEN AVE.",
  "vehicle_model_year": 2020,
  "record_id": "6848Taxi",
  "city": "CHICAGO",
  "wheelchair_accessible": "N"
}

Inputs

Field	What it does
Filter (SoQL)	Applied at the source, so a narrow question fetches a narrow page instead of downloading everything.
Order	Empty keeps the publisher's own order; set a column to sort, for example amount DESC.
Maximum rows	Hard cap. The source is paged 1,000 rows at a time.
Time budget	Stops cleanly and reports how far it got.
Pause between pages	Keeps the run inside the publisher's rate limits.

Limitations

• This is one dataset, from one publisher. It is the Public Passenger Vehicle Licenses dataset as City of Chicago publishes it — not a national or cross-city equivalent, and not a merge with other sources.
• The publisher can change it. Columns are added, renamed and retired upstream; the field list here is the schema the Actor was generated from. A renamed column arrives as a new field only after the Actor is updated.
• Fields are typed from live records. A column that was empty in the sample is declared as text; a value that does not fit the declared type comes back null rather than being coerced into a wrong number.
• Records are what the publisher publishes. No geocoding, no de-duplication across datasets, no enrichment.
• Freshness is the publisher's. The data was last changed upstream on 2026-10-23. Where the publisher supplies a row timestamp it appears as sourceUpdatedAt; scrapedAt records when this Actor read the row.

Why this is different

• Public Passenger Vehicle Licenses — Chicago declares all 17 of its output fields in the dataset schema, each with a type, a description and an example.
• The Actor reads the Public Passenger Vehicle Licenses dataset directly from Chicago Open Data; no key, login or account is needed.
• Filters run at the source with SoQL, so a narrow request returns a narrow page rather than a full download.
• Every row is flat JSON: nested location objects become latitude and longitude, and no field holds a nested object.
• The row id is stable, so the same request de-duplicates instead of returning the same record twice.

FAQ

Do I need an API key? No. Chicago Open Data publishes this dataset openly.

How fresh is it? The Actor reads the dataset live. scrapedAt records when each row was read, and sourceUpdatedAt carries the publisher's own row timestamp where it supplies one.

Can I filter by date or status? Yes — use the Filter field with SoQL, for example status = 'Active'.

What happens if my filter is wrong? The run stops with the portal's own message and the hint to check SoQL, rather than returning an empty dataset that looks like "no data".

Is this the whole dataset? Up to your row cap, paged 1,000 at a time. Raise the cap to read more.

What is sourceRowId? The publisher's own row id when it supplies one, otherwise a stable hash of the row. Either way it is what makes de-duplication and joins possible.

Pricing

Pay per result: $0.0005 per row. A run that matches nothing is not charged for rows.

Data source

Chicago Open Data — Public Passenger Vehicle Licenses, published by City of Chicago. Public data under the portal's open-data terms.