Editorial standards

Rules for this edition

• Safety steps are labeled as safety steps. Statute summaries are labeled as statute summaries.
• Phone numbers, fees, and deadlines appear only when an official page stated them.
• City of Houston instructions are not described as Harris County instructions, or the reverse.
• No crash statistics, no settlement estimates, no star ratings, no invented reviews, and no fictional lawyer.
• No tracking pixels or forms that collect a story. Labelled display ads appear only after the page content, never inside guidance.
• Official prose is paraphrased. Short operative phrases from statutes are quoted because the wording is the rule. Metadata describes the publication; there are no social sharing widgets.
• Images are original marks drawn for this site. No stock photography and no agency seals.

A disclaimer does not finish the job. It does not license a stale fee, it does not fit a paragraph to your facts, and it does not replace a lawyer, a clinician, or the agency that actually has your report. Pages can be wrong. Statutes and city rates change. The checked date for this edition is November 8, 2026.

Conflicts we refused to smooth over

• HPD says crash reports take 5 to 8 days. Its December 2025 form says wait at least 10 days. The officer’s statutory filing deadline is the 10th day.
• HPD’s records page, its services index, and its request form do not all print the same online purchase address.
• HPD’s request form cites Transportation Code § 601.501 in a checkbox. Section 550.065(c)(4)(F) cites § 601.051.
• Tow and Go’s page and the December 2025 Motorist Bill of Rights do not print the same Auto Dealers phone number.
• HPD’s services index still links a driver’s blue-form page. That path returned HTTP 404 when checked.

Left out because it was not verified for this edition

• Any City of Houston charter deadline for notice of a claim against the city.
• A case-specific determination of notice sufficiency, immunity or an applicable limitations date. The general Tort Claims Act notice provision was read, but it is not a personalized deadline.
• Whether Houston currently has an ordinance under § 550.067 requiring a driver to file a local crash report, and any deadline in such an ordinance.
• Daily storage-lot fees, toll-road tow rates, and the current TDLR maximum for private-property tows.
• The dollar amount of TxDOT’s card-processing surcharge.
• Phone numbers for suburban police departments, METRO police, airport police, and DPS offices.
• The penalty range for driving without required financial responsibility.
• Any medical instruction beyond 911 and the CDC head-injury pages that were actually opened.
• A 2014 HPD news release that told drivers to file a blue form within 10 days. It was not used, because TxDOT’s current page says CR-2 forms are no longer filed with the department.

Source access limits

The legacy direct CRIS purchase portal and older purchase-guide PDF returned HTTP 403 to automated access. Current report links point to TxDOT’s working crash-records landing page, which links its current purchase route. Earlier PDF-only purchase timing claims have been removed. This is an access limitation, not proof that the public service is unavailable in a reader’s browser.

Corrections

For publication corrections, email [email protected]. There is no contact form or legal intake service. Do not send crash stories, identifying records or requests for representation. An email does not create an attorney-client relationship. Before relying on a fee or a phone number, open the linked official page and read it yourself. This edition is not legal sign-off. No lawyer reviewed it as a formal opinion, and this sentence is not a claim of compliance.

Independence

Pages do not sell leads. They do not rank lawyers. Advertisers have no say in the guidance. Links to LexisNexis purchase tools are included only because HPD or TxDOT tells the public to use them. Those companies are not sponsors of this guide.

When official summaries differ

TDI’s general claim-steps page describes acknowledgment in business days, while its auto guide uses days. For the general first-party acknowledgment rule, this site follows Insurance Code §542.055: the 15th day after receipt of notice, with a separate eligible-surplus-lines rule. Later decision and payment stages generally use business days. The timeline tool calculates no statutory due dates.