Buckle Up: Here Are Massachusetts’ Costliest Crash Locations
It takes skill to drive in Massachusetts as the pace is fast and often unruly. One wrong move or failure to use your turn signal can result in unwanted accidents, injury or death.
According to MassDOT, in the past 12 years,1,630,592 crashes have occurred in Massachusetts, 4,397 of them fatal.
Between 2017 and 2019,
New Bedford claimed the fourth spot on the list for the most destructive intersection crashes in Massachusetts. To put that into perspective, that's out of 292 towns and 59 cities. New Bedford logged 587 total crashes in one of those intersections within those three years.
Data from 2020 to the present are not yet available.
The MassDOT website gives you an in-depth look at Interactive data dashboards that show every town and city in Massachusetts and their crash percentages. The costliest crash location statewide is in Milton at Randolph Avenue and Chickatawbut Road. The least costly is in Worchester at Shrewsbury and Aitchison streets.
A closer look at the data collected from MassDOT between 2010 and 2022 shows the breakdown of car crashes, bike accidents and even pedestrian crash locations, including the severity of the injuries. The calculations -- classified under Equivalent Property Damage Only -- help the state examine safety weaknesses and, hopefully, develop better driving environments. The state explains:
'Equivalent property damage only' is a method of combining the number of crashes with the severity of crashes based on a weighted scale. Prior to 2016 the weighting factors used were as follows: a fatal crash was worth 10, an injury crash was worth 5, and a property-damage only crash was worth 1. Starting in 2016, the weighting factors were updated so that fatal and injury crashes are worth 21 and a property-damage-only crash is worth 1."
Here are Massachusetts' top 10 costliest crash locations, as ranked by the state.