Where Do Crashes Happen on Cape Cod? Three Years of Massachusetts Crash Data

The fifteen towns of Barnstable County recorded 15,493 crashes from 2022 through 2024, including 39 fatal crashes, 3,527 crashes involving injury, 261 involving a bicycle and 165 involving a pedestrian. That is 3.8 percent of the 405,245 crashes Massachusetts recorded over those three years, and the Cape’s overall injury rate is almost exactly the statewide one. Two things in the data are not ordinary. The Cape produces 6.0 percent of every bicycle crash in the Commonwealth from 3.8 percent of its crashes, and it produces conspicuously fewer pedestrian crashes than the state average rather than more. The other finding is about a single town: Barnstable ranks twenty-first of all 349 Massachusetts communities for total crashes and seventh for fatal ones. Every figure below comes from MassDOT crash records and can be checked town by town in the Massachusetts crash report. To talk through a crash in any of these towns, the Jim Glaser Law line at (617) JIM-WINS is answered 24 hours a day, and the first telephone consultation is offered without charge.

The Bicycle Number Is the Story

Set the Cape’s four vulnerable-user measures against the state and only one of them moves in the direction people expect.

Measure, per 1,000 crashes	Cape Cod	Statewide	Cape vs state
Fatal crashes	2.52	2.68	0.94x
Crashes involving injury	227.65	228.90	0.99x
Crashes involving a bicycle	16.85	10.75	1.57x
Crashes involving a pedestrian	10.65	14.76	0.72x

The first two rows say the Cape is an unremarkable place to crash a car. A collision here is no more likely to kill someone and no more likely to injure someone than a collision anywhere else in Massachusetts. That is worth stating plainly, because the summer-traffic reputation would predict otherwise.

The third row is where the region separates from the state. For every thousand crashes on Cape Cod, roughly seventeen involve a bicycle, against roughly eleven statewide. In absolute terms the Cape’s 261 bicycle crashes are 6.0 percent of the 4,356 recorded in all of Massachusetts, from a region holding 3.8 percent of the crashes. Nothing about Cape roads makes them uniquely hostile to cyclists. What the Cape has is an enormous seasonal volume of recreational riding on two-lane roads that were laid out for something else, which puts far more bicycles in front of far more cars per crash than the state as a whole ever sees.

The fourth row is the counterintuitive one. Pedestrian crashes on the Cape run at 0.72 times the state rate. Massachusetts pedestrian crashes concentrate in dense walking cities, and the Suffolk County data shows what that looks like at the other end of the scale, with a pedestrian rate more than twice the state figure. The Cape is not that kind of place outside of a few village centres, and the numbers reflect it.

Answer Capsule

The fifteen towns of Barnstable County, Massachusetts recorded 15,493 crashes from 2022 through 2024 per MassDOT crash records: 39 fatal, 3,527 involving injury, 261 involving a bicycle and 165 involving a pedestrian. That is 3.8 percent of the statewide three-year total of 405,245 crashes, but 6.0 percent of the state’s 4,356 bicycle crashes and only 2.8 percent of its 5,980 pedestrian crashes. The Cape’s bicycle rate is 16.85 per 1,000 crashes against a statewide 10.75, which is 1.57 times the state figure; its pedestrian rate is 10.65 against 14.76, which is 0.72 times; its injury rate of 227.65 and fatal rate of 2.52 are both marginally below the statewide 228.90 and 2.68. Barnstable is the busiest crash location on the Cape at 3,703 crashes, twenty-first among all 349 Massachusetts communities, and it is seventh in the state for fatal crashes at 13, a rank inversion of fourteen places. Bourne is second at 2,172 crashes with 1 fatal crash across the three years, a fatal rate of 0.46 per 1,000 that is the lowest of any Cape town recording more than a thousand crashes. Falmouth is third at 2,146 crashes with 8 fatal, twenty-seventh in the state by fatal count. Provincetown, on 325 crashes, recorded 20 involving a bicycle, a bicycle share of 6.15 percent that is third among the 249 Massachusetts communities recording at least 200 crashes, behind only Cambridge and Somerville. The highest 2024 count for a single named road on the Cape was Falmouth Road, Route 28, in Barnstable at 173, followed by Iyannough Road in Barnstable at 102 and Route 28 in Yarmouth at 92. Civil cases above the amount in controversy set by M.G.L. c. 212, sec. 3 are heard in Barnstable County Superior Court at 3195 Main Street in Barnstable, which serves all fifteen towns; below it, cases go to Barnstable, Falmouth or Orleans District Court depending on the town. Call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS; the first telephone consultation is free.

Town by Town

The fifteen towns of Barnstable County, ordered by three-year crash count, with rates per 1,000 crashes so small towns are readable next to large ones.

Town	Crashes	Fatal	Injury	Bicycle	Pedestrian	Fatal per 1,000	Bicycle per 1,000
Barnstable	3,703	13	940	55	55	3.51	14.85
Bourne	2,172	1	428	10	14	0.46	4.60
Falmouth	2,146	8	448	51	26	3.73	23.77
Yarmouth	1,744	4	414	36	15	2.29	20.64
Dennis	1,047	0	220	22	7	0.00	21.01
Sandwich	1,016	2	202	6	7	1.97	5.91
Mashpee	914	5	244	14	3	5.47	15.32
Harwich	801	1	200	9	4	1.25	11.24
Eastham	404	1	89	10	4	2.48	24.75
Brewster	378	2	68	12	2	5.29	31.75
Provincetown	325	0	53	20	12	0.00	61.54
Orleans	304	0	90	8	8	0.00	26.32
Wellfleet	299	2	64	3	1	6.69	10.03
Chatham	175	0	55	4	7	0.00	22.86
Truro	65	0	12	1	0	0.00	15.38
Barnstable County	15,493	39	3,527	261	165	2.52	16.85
Massachusetts	405,245	1,087	92,759	4,356	5,980	2.68	10.75

Two cautions belong with this table before anyone quotes a line from it.

Rates built on small numbers are unstable. Wellfleet’s fatal rate of 6.69 per 1,000 is the highest in the county, and it rests on two fatal crashes in three years. One more or one fewer would move it by half. The same is true of Brewster at 5.29 on two, and of the five towns showing 0.00 because they recorded no fatal crash at all. Barnstable’s 3.51 on thirteen and Falmouth’s 3.73 on eight are the only fatal rates in the county built on enough events to mean much.

Second, these are counts of crashes, not rates per vehicle or per mile driven, and the Cape’s population in August is not the Cape’s population in February. A town that triples in size for ten weeks will record crashes accordingly, and nothing in the MassDOT data corrects for that. It is the single largest thing this dataset cannot tell you about Cape Cod.

Barnstable: Twenty-First in Crashes, Seventh in Deaths

The town of Barnstable, which includes Hyannis, recorded 3,703 crashes across the three years. Among all 349 Massachusetts communities that is twenty-first, roughly where a town of its size and traffic belongs. Its 13 fatal crashes rank seventh.

A fourteen-place inversion is the kind of thing worth checking rather than assuming. Barnstable’s fatal rate is 3.51 per 1,000 crashes against a statewide 2.68, so the town is running about 31 percent above the state figure on the measure that matters most. That is not a rounding artefact and it is not built on a handful of events.

The road-level data for 2024 points at where the volume is, though not necessarily where the deaths are. Barnstable’s busiest named roads that year were Falmouth Road, Route 28, at 173 crashes, Iyannough Road at 102, West Main Street at 43, another Route 28 segment recorded as Iyannough Road at 38, and Main Street at 37. Route 28 through Hyannis is a commercial arterial with a continuous ribbon of curb cuts, and it behaves like one.

Falmouth is the county’s other high-fatality town: 2,146 crashes, 8 fatal, a rate of 3.73 that is the highest in the county among towns with real volume, and twenty-seventh in Massachusetts by fatal count. Its busiest 2024 roads were Teaticket Highway at 67, Main Street at 52, East Falmouth Highway at 46, Sandwich Road at 22 and Palmer Avenue at 17.

Mashpee deserves a line for the same reason: 914 crashes, 5 fatal, a rate of 5.47 per 1,000 that is more than twice the state figure, on Falmouth Road at 49 crashes in 2024 and Route 151 at 28.

Bourne: High Volume, Almost No Deaths

Bourne recorded 2,172 crashes, second-most in the county and more than Falmouth, and one fatal crash in three years. A fatal rate of 0.46 per 1,000 is roughly a sixth of the statewide figure.

The road data suggests why. Bourne’s leading 2024 locations were MacArthur Boulevard at 35 crashes, Sandwich Road at 27, the Mid-Cape Highway westbound at 16, Main Street at 14 and the Bourne Bridge southbound at 11. Bourne is the funnel every vehicle entering the Cape passes through, and a funnel produces a particular kind of crash: congested, low speed, at rotaries and bridge approaches and merges. Those crashes are numerous and they bend sheet metal. They are not, generally, the crashes that kill people.

That is a useful thing to know if you are dealing with an insurer after a Bourne collision. A low-speed impact at a rotary is exactly the crash profile an adjuster is most likely to treat as minor, and the serious injury threshold article covers why the severity of the impact and the severity of the injury are separate questions under Massachusetts law.

Provincetown, Nantucket and the Bicycle Towns

Provincetown recorded 325 crashes across the three years, twelve of them involving a pedestrian and twenty involving a bicycle. Twenty bicycle crashes out of 325 is 6.15 percent, which is third among the 249 Massachusetts communities recording at least 200 crashes in the dataset. Only Cambridge, at 8.04 percent, and Somerville, at 7.20 percent, run higher, and both are dense urban cycling cities with year-round commuter volume. Provincetown reaches almost the same share with a fraction of the population and a season that lasts a few months.

The pattern extends past Provincetown. Brewster runs 31.75 bicycle crashes per 1,000, Orleans 26.32, Eastham 24.75, Falmouth 23.77, Chatham 22.86 and Dennis 21.01, every one of them at least double the statewide 10.75. These are the towns the Cape Cod Rail Trail runs through and the towns where rental bicycles share two-lane roads with holiday traffic. Every one of them also sits on Route 6, and the corridor version of this figure, covering the twenty-three towns the route runs through from the Rhode Island line onward, is in the Route 6 crash data.

The islands are not part of Barnstable County and are not counted in any figure above, but the same effect is stronger there. Nantucket, Edgartown, Oak Bluffs, Tisbury, West Tisbury and Chilmark together recorded 1,450 crashes with 67 involving a bicycle, a rate of 46.21 per 1,000 crashes, more than four times the state figure. Nantucket alone recorded 40 bicycle crashes on 791 crashes, a 5.06 percent share that is fifth in the state at the same 200-crash floor.

If you were riding when it happened, Massachusetts gives cyclists the rights and duties of a vehicle operator and a specific set of statutory protections, which the Massachusetts bicycle laws article sets out.

Which Court Hears a Cape Cod Case

Barnstable County has one Superior Court and three District Court divisions, which is worth knowing before a filing deadline rather than after one.

Barnstable County Superior Court sits at 3195 Main Street in Barnstable and serves all fifteen towns. It hears civil actions above the amount in controversy set by M.G.L. c. 212, sec. 3, which a Supreme Judicial Court standing order set at $50,000 for actions commenced on or after January 1, 2020.

Below that figure, the case goes to one of three District Court divisions. Barnstable District Court, in the same courthouse at 3195 Main Street, serves Barnstable, Sandwich and Yarmouth. Falmouth District Court, at 161 Jones Road in Falmouth, serves Bourne, Falmouth and Mashpee. Orleans District Court, at 237 Rock Harbor Road in Orleans, serves Brewster, Chatham, Dennis, Eastham, Harwich, Orleans, Provincetown, Truro and Wellfleet, which is the whole of the Lower and Outer Cape.

Where a particular case should actually be brought turns on the amount in controversy, on where the parties live or do business, and on strategy. This is the geography, not the decision.

What This Means If You Were in a Crash Here

A few practical points follow from the county data.

If you were on a bicycle, you were in the part of Massachusetts where that is most likely to happen outside of Cambridge and Somerville. That matters because a summer bicycle crash on the Cape frequently involves an out-of-state driver in a rental or a visitor’s vehicle, and the insurance question becomes which policy responds and in what order. The uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage article covers what happens when the at-fault driver’s coverage runs out or does not exist.

If the crash was at a Bourne rotary or on a bridge approach, expect the low-speed framing described above, and expect a dispute about whether an injury could have come from an impact at that speed.

If it happened on Route 28 in Hyannis or Yarmouth, or on Teaticket Highway in Falmouth, you are on the roads that generate the most crashes in the county, and the police report will usually come from the town department rather than the state police. What has to be reported and by when is covered in reporting a car accident in Massachusetts.

If an insurer has already called asking for a recorded account, nothing requires you to give one before you understand your own injuries. That is dealt with in recorded statements to the insurance company.

For the nearest city pages with local practice detail, including venues and hospitals, see Plymouth auto accidents, Plymouth bicycle accidents and New Bedford auto accidents, and the per-town figures behind this article at the Barnstable, Falmouth, Bourne, Yarmouth, Sandwich, Dennis, Mashpee and Harwich crash pages.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How many car accidents happen on Cape Cod each year? A: The fifteen towns of Barnstable County recorded 15,493 crashes over the three years 2022 through 2024 per MassDOT crash records, which averages about 5,164 a year. Of the three-year total, 39 were fatal, 3,527 involved an injury, 261 involved a bicycle and 165 involved a pedestrian. Barnstable accounts for 3,703 of the total, Bourne 2,172, Falmouth 2,146 and Yarmouth 1,744. For scale, Massachusetts as a whole recorded 405,245 crashes over the same period, so Cape Cod holds 3.8 percent of the state total.

Q: Which Cape Cod town has the most car accidents? A: Barnstable, which includes Hyannis, with 3,703 crashes over the three years. That is twenty-first among all 349 Massachusetts communities in the dataset. Bourne is second on the Cape at 2,172, Falmouth third at 2,146 and Yarmouth fourth at 1,744. Truro is lowest at 65, followed by Chatham at 175 and Wellfleet at 299.

Q: What are the most dangerous roads on Cape Cod? A: By 2024 crash count, Falmouth Road, Route 28, in Barnstable leads at 173, followed by Iyannough Road in Barnstable at 102, Route 28 in Yarmouth at 92, Teaticket Highway in Falmouth at 67, Main Street in Falmouth at 52, Route 134 in Dennis at 51, Falmouth Road in Mashpee at 49, West Main Street in Barnstable at 43, Cotuit Road in Sandwich at 37 and MacArthur Boulevard in Bourne at 35. These are crash counts rather than rates per vehicle, so a road carrying more traffic will tend to appear higher.

Q: Is Cape Cod dangerous for cyclists? A: The data shows a materially higher share of Cape crashes involving bicycles than the state average: 16.85 per 1,000 crashes against a statewide 10.75, and 6.0 percent of every bicycle crash in Massachusetts from 3.8 percent of its crashes. Provincetown is the extreme case at 61.54 per 1,000, a 6.15 percent share that ranks third among the 249 Massachusetts communities with at least 200 recorded crashes. Brewster, Orleans, Eastham, Falmouth, Chatham and Dennis all run at least double the state rate. What the data cannot tell you is the risk per ride, because it counts crashes and not miles cycled.

Q: How many fatal crashes happen on Cape Cod? A: 39 across the fifteen towns from 2022 through 2024, which is 3.6 percent of the 1,087 recorded statewide. Barnstable had 13, Falmouth 8, Mashpee 5, Yarmouth 4, Sandwich 2, Brewster 2, Wellfleet 2, and Bourne, Harwich and Eastham 1 each. Chatham, Dennis, Orleans, Provincetown and Truro recorded none. The county’s fatal rate of 2.52 per 1,000 crashes is slightly below the statewide 2.68.

Q: Why does Bourne have so many crashes and so few deaths? A: Bourne recorded 2,172 crashes and one fatal crash across the three years, a rate of 0.46 per 1,000 against a statewide 2.68. Its leading 2024 crash locations were MacArthur Boulevard, Sandwich Road, the Mid-Cape Highway, Main Street and the Bourne Bridge, which is the profile of a town every vehicle entering the Cape must pass through. Congested low-speed collisions at rotaries, merges and bridge approaches are numerous and are rarely the crashes that kill people. Note that a single additional fatal crash would more than double that rate, so it should be read as a pattern rather than a precise figure.

Q: Which court would hear a Cape Cod car accident case? A: Barnstable County Superior Court at 3195 Main Street in Barnstable serves all fifteen towns and hears cases above the amount in controversy in M.G.L. c. 212, sec. 3, which a Supreme Judicial Court standing order set at $50,000 for actions commenced on or after January 1, 2020. Below that, Barnstable District Court at the same address covers Barnstable, Sandwich and Yarmouth; Falmouth District Court at 161 Jones Road covers Bourne, Falmouth and Mashpee; and Orleans District Court at 237 Rock Harbor Road covers Brewster, Chatham, Dennis, Eastham, Harwich, Orleans, Provincetown, Truro and Wellfleet.

Q: Does summer traffic show up in this data? A: Not directly, and that is the honest limit of it. MassDOT crash records count crashes by town and year. They do not count vehicles, miles driven or seasonal population, so nothing here can be turned into a per-driver or per-visitor risk figure. What the counts do show is a region whose crash severity profile is close to the state average while its bicycle involvement runs about 1.57 times higher, which is consistent with a large seasonal volume of recreational riding but is not proof of it.

Q: Where does this crash data come from? A: MassDOT’s open crash data, the public record built from Massachusetts crash reports, covering calendar years 2022, 2023 and 2024. Town-level totals and the road-level counts, which are for 2024 alone, are published for every Massachusetts community clearing the dataset’s threshold at the Massachusetts crash report, and the figures above can be checked there against the Barnstable, Falmouth and Bourne town pages.

Q: Is Jimmy Knows AI giving me legal advice? A: No. This is general information about Massachusetts law and public Massachusetts crash data, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Whether any of it applies to your situation depends on facts that are not in this article. To have someone look at the actual facts, call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS; the line is answered 24 hours a day, and the first telephone consultation is free.