How Dangerous Are Hampden County Roads? Three Years of Massachusetts Crash Data

Across the twenty-three cities and towns of Hampden County, Massachusetts recorded 34,623 crashes from 2022 through 2024, including 126 fatal crashes, 9,091 crashes involving injury, 321 involving a bicycle, and 471 involving a pedestrian. That is 8.5 percent of every crash in the Commonwealth and 11.6 percent of every fatal one. Measured as fatal crashes per 1,000 crashes, the county comes out at 3.64 against a statewide 2.68, which is 36 percent higher, and unlike every other county this series has examined, the excess is not coming from the rural edges. Springfield alone runs at 3.96 fatal crashes per 1,000, which is a higher ratio than Boston’s 3.73, and Chicopee runs at 4.20. Springfield is second in Massachusetts for fatal crashes and Chicopee is fourth, on a fraction of the crash volume of the cities they are ranked against. Every figure below comes from MassDOT crash records for 2022 through 2024 and can be checked against the town pages in the Massachusetts crash report. To talk through a crash anywhere in the county, call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS; the line is answered 24 hours a day, and the first telephone consultation is free.

The Twenty-Three Communities, and Where the Numbers Come From

Hampden County covers twenty-three cities and towns: Agawam, Blandford, Brimfield, Chester, Chicopee, East Longmeadow, Granville, Hampden, Holland, Holyoke, Longmeadow, Ludlow, Monson, Montgomery, Palmer, Russell, Southwick, Springfield, Tolland, Wales, West Springfield, Westfield, and Wilbraham.

The crash counts come from MassDOT’s open crash data, the record built from Massachusetts crash reports, covering calendar years 2022, 2023, and 2024. That includes the fatal-crash counts, which come from the same MassDOT records rather than from any federal dataset. The road-level counts further down are for 2024, the most recent complete year in the dataset, because road naming in the source data shifts enough year over year that stacking three years of it produces noise rather than signal.

For scale, the same three years produced 405,245 crashes statewide, 1,087 fatal crashes, 92,759 crashes involving injury, 4,356 involving a bicycle, and 5,980 involving a pedestrian.

One caution, stated up front rather than buried. Every comparison here is crash to crash, not crash per resident and not crash per mile driven. A town with more crashes may simply have more traffic passing through it, and several Hampden County communities carry very large volumes of through traffic on Interstate 91, Interstate 90, Interstate 291 and Route 20. That is a genuine limitation of the data. It is also why the ratio comparisons in this piece, which hold crash volume constant, carry more information than the raw counts.

Where the Volume Is

Ranked by total crashes over the three years:

Community	Crashes	Fatal	Injury	Statewide crash rank
Springfield	11,109	44	3,783	3rd of 349
Chicopee	5,238	22	1,193	12th
Holyoke	4,245	12	978	18th
West Springfield	3,277	6	682	28th
Agawam	2,034	4	396	51st
Westfield	1,864	3	631	55th
Ludlow	1,604	6	316	72nd
Palmer	1,090	4	252	108th
East Longmeadow	994	5	213	117th
Longmeadow	939	2	207	126th
Wilbraham	830	5	138	140th

This is a far more concentrated county than Norfolk. Springfield is the third highest-crash community in Massachusetts, behind only Boston and Worcester, and it holds 32 percent of its own county’s crashes. The top four communities together hold 69 percent. Behind Wilbraham the distribution falls off a cliff: the twelfth-ranked community in the county, Southwick, recorded 354 crashes over three years, less than half of Wilbraham’s total and about three percent of Springfield’s.

Full three-year figures for the towns above are published at Springfield, Chicopee, Holyoke, West Springfield, Agawam, Westfield, Ludlow, Palmer, East Longmeadow, Longmeadow, and Wilbraham.

The Number That Makes This County Different

Hampden County holds 8.5 percent of the state’s crashes and 11.6 percent of its fatal crashes. No other measure in the dataset separates those two shares by as much.

In every other county this series has looked at, the fatal ratio has been close to the state average, and the interesting variation has been inside the county: dense urban cores producing many low-severity collisions and rural edges producing few crashes but severe ones. Norfolk County came out at 2.72 fatal per 1,000 against the state’s 2.68, and its busiest city, Quincy, was also its safest at 1.08.

Hampden does not work that way.

Measure	Hampden County	Massachusetts
Fatal crashes per 1,000 crashes	3.64	2.68
Injury crashes per 1,000 crashes	262.6	228.9
Bicycle crashes per 1,000 crashes	9.3	10.7
Pedestrian crashes per 1,000 crashes	13.6	14.8

The county is above the state on the two severity measures and below it on the two vulnerable-road-user measures. Take Springfield out entirely and the remaining twenty-two communities still run at 3.49 fatal per 1,000, well above the state. There is no single town carrying this.

Springfield is the part that will surprise people who expect big cities to produce many minor collisions. It recorded 44 fatal crashes over the three years, which is second in Massachusetts behind Boston’s 65, on 11,109 crashes against Boston’s 17,407. Its ratio, 3.96 per 1,000, is higher than Boston’s 3.73 and more than double Worcester’s 1.86. Worcester recorded 15,598 crashes, 40 percent more than Springfield, and 29 fatal crashes, a third fewer.

Chicopee is the sharper case. It recorded 22 fatal crashes, fourth in the entire state, on 5,238 crashes, which is twelfth. Its ratio of 4.20 per 1,000 is the highest of any of the nine communities at the top of the statewide fatal-crash list. Holyoke recorded 12, tied with Taunton for eighth.

Three of the state’s nine highest fatal-crash communities are in Hampden County. The other six sit in five different counties, since New Bedford and Taunton are both in Bristol.

Answer Capsule

Hampden County, Massachusetts recorded 34,623 crashes across its twenty-three cities and towns from 2022 through 2024, per MassDOT crash records: 126 fatal, 9,091 involving injury, 321 involving a bicycle, and 471 involving a pedestrian. That is 8.5 percent of the statewide three-year total of 405,245 crashes, but 11.6 percent of the state’s 1,087 fatal crashes. The county’s fatal-crash ratio is 3.64 per 1,000 crashes against a statewide 2.68, and its injury ratio is 262.6 per 1,000 against 228.9. Springfield is the county’s busiest at 11,109 crashes, third among all 349 Massachusetts communities, followed by Chicopee at 5,238, Holyoke at 4,245, West Springfield at 3,277, and Agawam at 2,034. Unlike Norfolk County, where the largest city was also the safest, Hampden’s core carries the excess: Springfield recorded 44 fatal crashes, second in the state behind Boston’s 65, at a ratio of 3.96 per 1,000 that exceeds Boston’s 3.73, and Chicopee recorded 22, fourth in the state, at 4.20 per 1,000. Three of the nine Massachusetts communities with the most fatal crashes are in this one county. Remove Springfield and the remaining twenty-two communities still run at 3.49 per 1,000. The ratio climbs further away from the river: the ten metro-core communities run at 3.39, the six eastern Quaboag towns at 6.05, and the seven western hilltowns at 8.37. Grouped by the District Court that hears each town’s cases, the ratio runs from 2.83 in the Holyoke division through 2.96 in Westfield, 3.39 in Springfield and 4.20 in Chicopee to 5.12 in the Palmer division. The highest 2024 count for a single named road was Memorial Drive in Chicopee at 203, followed by Riverdale Street in West Springfield at 171, measured across the eleven county communities the dataset carries road-level detail for. Civil cases are heard in Hampden County Superior Court at 50 State Street in Springfield, which serves every city and town in the county, or in the geographic District Court division, depending on the amount in controversy under M.G.L. c. 212, sec. 3. Call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS; the first telephone consultation is free.

The Gradient Runs East and West of the River

Group the twenty-three communities by geography and the same pattern the series has found everywhere else appears, except that it starts from a higher floor.

Band	Towns	Crashes	Fatal	Fatal per 1,000
Metro core along the Connecticut River	10	32,134	109	3.39
Eastern Quaboag towns	6	1,653	10	6.05
Western hilltowns	7	836	7	8.37

The metro core is Springfield, Chicopee, Holyoke, West Springfield, Agawam, Westfield, Ludlow, East Longmeadow, Longmeadow and Wilbraham. It holds 93 percent of the county’s crashes and already runs above the state average. The eastern towns, Palmer, Monson, Brimfield, Holland, Wales and Hampden, run at more than twice the state ratio. The western hilltowns, Blandford, Chester, Granville, Montgomery, Russell, Southwick and Tolland, run at more than three times it.

The small-town figures need reading with care and this article will not pretend otherwise. Holland recorded one fatal crash on 23 total, which computes to 43.48 per 1,000 and means nothing at that sample size. Monson recorded one on 79. Four of the seven western hilltowns recorded no fatal crash at all across three years, which also means very little. The band totals are more trustworthy than any individual small town in them, because pooling seven towns produces a large enough denominator to say something.

Among communities recording at least 500 crashes over the three years, where the ratios are stable enough to compare:

Community	Crashes	Fatal	Fatal per 1,000
Wilbraham	830	5	6.02
East Longmeadow	994	5	5.03
Chicopee	5,238	22	4.20
Springfield	11,109	44	3.96
Ludlow	1,604	6	3.74
Palmer	1,090	4	3.67
Holyoke	4,245	12	2.83
Longmeadow	939	2	2.13
Agawam	2,034	4	1.97
West Springfield	3,277	6	1.83
Westfield	1,864	3	1.61

Seven of the eleven are above the state average of 2.68 and four are below it, which is a wider internal spread than the county’s single headline figure suggests. West Springfield and Westfield sit at roughly half the county ratio, and both are below the state average. Wilbraham, a town of 830 crashes, sits above both by a wide margin.

Two vulnerable-road-user figures are worth pulling out because they run against the county trend. Springfield recorded 214 pedestrian crashes, which is 19.3 per 1,000 crashes against a statewide 14.8, the highest pedestrian share in the county by a distance. Westfield recorded 26 bicycle crashes on 1,864, which is 13.9 per 1,000 against a statewide 10.7, the highest bicycle share of any Hampden community with real volume. Springfield’s bicycle share, 11.5 per 1,000, is also above the state. Those two categories are the ones where the county’s below-average totals conceal specific places that are not below average at all.

The Roads

The source data carries road-level detail only for communities clearing 800 crashes over the three years, which in Hampden County means eleven of the twenty-three. The twelve smaller towns, from Southwick down to Tolland, are not represented in the ranking below at all. Counts are for named roads within each community for 2024, not totals for a corridor across town lines.

Road	Community	2024 crashes
Memorial Drive	Chicopee	203
Riverdale Street	West Springfield	171
Center Street	Ludlow	89
Memorial Avenue	West Springfield	68
Main Street	Agawam	62
Montgomery Street	Chicopee	59
Chicopee Street	Chicopee	57
Westfield Street	West Springfield	49
Boston Road	Wilbraham	49
Boston Road	Springfield	48
Springfield Street	Agawam	45
North Main Street	East Longmeadow	41

Memorial Drive in Chicopee is not just the county’s worst road. Across all 144 Massachusetts communities the dataset carries road-level detail for, it is the second highest single-community road entry in the state for 2024, behind only the southbound side of Interstate 93 in Boston at 219, and it is the highest that is not an interstate. Chicopee recorded 5,238 crashes over three years across the whole city, and Memorial Drive alone accounted for 203 in one year. Riverdale Street in West Springfield, at 171, ties with Main Street in Worcester for fifth in that same statewide ranking. Three of the top seven entries are Chicopee streets. West Springfield holds three more, led by Riverdale Street at 171.

What is missing from that table is as informative as what is in it. Springfield, with more than twice Chicopee’s crashes, has no road above 48. Its highest counts, Boston Road at 48, Page Boulevard at 36, Liberty Street at 35, State Street at 31, Wilbraham Road at 30 and Parker Street at 30, describe a city where collisions are spread thinly across a large street grid rather than piled onto two or three arterials. Chicopee and West Springfield are the opposite: fewer crashes overall, concentrated hard on a handful of commercial corridors.

Boston Road appears twice in that table, once in Wilbraham at 49 and once in Springfield at 48, because the source records each community separately. It is one road crossing the town line, and the source data labels the Wilbraham segment as Route 20. Combined, the two segments recorded 97 crashes in 2024, which would place the corridor third in the county behind Memorial Drive and Riverdale Street.

The interstates barely register in this ranking, which is a quirk of how the source records road names rather than a statement about highway safety. The highest interstate entry anywhere in the county is Interstate 91 northbound in Longmeadow at 19 crashes in 2024, followed by Interstate 90 westbound in Ludlow at 12 and Interstate 90 eastbound in Palmer at 9. Corridor-level highway analysis needs a different cut of the data, which is what the Interstate 93, Interstate 495 and Route 128 pieces do for the eastern corridors.

Where a Hampden County Case Is Heard

Massachusetts assigns every town to a District Court division, and those assignments are published by the Trial Court. In Hampden County all twenty-three towns are covered by five courts, with no town left over and none appearing twice, so the catchment figures below sum exactly to the county totals.

District Court	Towns served	Crashes	Fatal	Fatal per 1,000
Palmer	Brimfield, East Longmeadow, Hampden, Holland, Ludlow, Monson, Palmer, Wales, Wilbraham	5,081	26	5.12
Chicopee	Chicopee	5,238	22	4.20
Springfield	Longmeadow, Springfield, West Springfield	15,325	52	3.39
Westfield	Agawam, Blandford, Chester, Granville, Montgomery, Russell, Southwick, Tolland, Westfield	4,734	14	2.96
Holyoke	Holyoke	4,245	12	2.83

The Springfield division carries 44 percent of the county’s crashes on three communities. The Palmer division, which is nine mostly rural towns east of the metro core, carries 15 percent of the crashes and runs at nearly double the Holyoke ratio. All five divisions sit above the statewide 2.68, which is not true of any other county in this series.

The addresses, for the record. Hampden County Superior Court is at 50 State Street in Springfield and serves every city and town in the county. Springfield District Court is at the same address, 50 State Street, in the building officially named the Roderick L. Ireland Courthouse, and it serves Longmeadow, Springfield and West Springfield. Chicopee District Court is at 30 Church Street in Chicopee and serves Chicopee. Holyoke District Court is at 20 Court Plaza in Holyoke and serves Holyoke. Westfield District Court is at 224 Elm Street in Westfield and serves Agawam, Blandford, Chester, Granville, Montgomery, Russell, Southwick, Tolland and Westfield. Palmer District Court is at 235 Sykes Street, Suite 3, in Palmer and serves Brimfield, East Longmeadow, Hampden, Holland, Ludlow, Monson, Palmer, Wales and Wilbraham.

Which court a civil case belongs in turns on the amount in controversy. Under M.G.L. c. 212, sec. 3, a civil action for money damages may proceed in the Superior Court only if there is no reasonable likelihood that recovery will be less than or equal to $25,000, a figure raised to $50,000 by a 2019 standing order of the Supreme Judicial Court for actions commenced on or after January 1, 2020.

What the Data Does and Does Not Tell You

It does not prove fault. A road’s crash history says nothing about whether a particular driver was careless on a particular day, and no Massachusetts court decides a case on a county aggregate. Fault is decided on the evidence of the collision itself, which is covered in how fault is determined in a Massachusetts car accident, and a claimant’s own share of the blame is governed by the rule explained in comparative negligence.

What it does tell you is where to look early. On a corridor like Memorial Drive or Riverdale Street, signal timing, sight lines, maintenance records and prior complaint history are worth requesting before they age out. It also tells you which courthouse the case will be in, which affects timing more than most people expect.

The severity pattern has one practical implication worth stating plainly. A county running 36 percent above the state on fatal crashes and 15 percent above it on injury crashes is a county where a larger share of collisions cross the serious injury threshold that determines whether a Massachusetts claim can go beyond no-fault PIP benefits at all.

For the practice-area pages covering the two Hampden County cities with their own commercial blocks, see car accidents in Springfield, motorcycle accidents in Springfield, scooter accidents in Springfield, car accidents in Chicopee, and truck accidents in Chicopee. The county’s own data pages are linked throughout this article, and every town in the state that clears the data threshold has one in the Massachusetts crash report. Sibling county pieces are Worcester County, Norfolk County, Middlesex County and Bristol County. Massachusetts injury matters at Jim Glaser Law are handled on a contingency fee, which means a percentage of any recovery rather than an hourly bill; costs and expenses are handled separately from the fee and are explained in writing before anything is signed. The intake line is answered 24 hours a day at (617) JIM-WINS, and the first telephone consultation is free.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How many crashes happen in Hampden County, Massachusetts each year?

A: Hampden County recorded 34,623 crashes over the three years 2022 through 2024 in MassDOT’s crash records, which averages roughly 11,500 a year. Of the three-year total, 126 were fatal, 9,091 involved an injury, 321 involved a bicycle, and 471 involved a pedestrian. The county accounts for 8.5 percent of all crashes in Massachusetts and 11.6 percent of all fatal crashes.

Q: Which city in Hampden County has the most crashes?

A: Springfield, at 11,109 crashes over the three years, which is third among all 349 Massachusetts communities behind Boston and Worcester, and about 32 percent of the county’s total. Chicopee is next at 5,238, then Holyoke at 4,245, West Springfield at 3,277 and Agawam at 2,034. The top four communities together account for 69 percent of the county’s crashes.

Q: Is Hampden County more dangerous than the rest of Massachusetts?

A: On the severity measures in this dataset, yes. The county records 3.64 fatal crashes per 1,000 crashes against a statewide 2.68, and 262.6 injury crashes per 1,000 against 228.9. It records fewer bicycle and pedestrian crashes per 1,000 than the state. What the data cannot tell you is why, because it carries no measure of traffic volume, road type or travel speed, so the honest description is that crashes here are more likely to be severe, not that drivers here are worse.

Q: Why does Springfield have so many fatal crashes?

A: The data shows the pattern but does not explain it, so what follows is inference rather than a finding. Springfield recorded 44 fatal crashes over three years, second in Massachusetts behind Boston, at 3.96 per 1,000 crashes, which exceeds Boston’s 3.73 and more than doubles Worcester’s 1.86. Cities with dense, slow street grids usually produce many low-severity collisions and a low fatal ratio, which is what Worcester and Quincy look like. Springfield does not fit that shape. Its own pedestrian share, 19.3 per 1,000 crashes against a statewide 14.8, is the highest in the county, and pedestrian collisions are severe at speeds that leave cars undamaged. That is a plausible part of the answer rather than a proven one.

Q: Which Hampden County roads have the most crashes?

A: In 2024, the most recent complete year in the dataset, Memorial Drive in Chicopee recorded 203 crashes, the highest single-road count in the county and the second highest anywhere in Massachusetts behind Interstate 93 southbound in Boston. Riverdale Street in West Springfield recorded 171, Center Street in Ludlow 89, Memorial Avenue in West Springfield 68, and Main Street in Agawam 62. Boston Road is the highest corridor once its two segments are combined, at 49 in Wilbraham and 48 in Springfield for 97. These are counts for named roads within each community, not totals for a corridor across town lines, and the source data carries road detail only for the eleven Hampden County communities clearing its threshold of 800 crashes over the three years, so the twelve smallest towns are not represented in the ranking.

Q: Are the hilltowns dangerous, or is that just small numbers?

A: Both things are true and they need separating. Pooled, the seven western hilltowns recorded 836 crashes and 7 fatal, a ratio of 8.37 per 1,000 that is more than triple the state average, and pooling seven towns gives a denominator large enough to take seriously. Individually the same figures fall apart: Russell recorded one fatal crash on 175 total, Blandford two on 223, and four of the seven recorded no fatal crash at all across three years. The band tells you something. Any single hilltown’s ratio does not.

Q: Where would my Hampden County car accident case be filed?

A: It depends on the amount in controversy and on where the crash happened. Under M.G.L. c. 212, sec. 3, a civil action for money damages may proceed in the Superior Court only if there is no reasonable likelihood that recovery will be less than or equal to $25,000, a figure raised to $50,000 by a 2019 standing order of the Supreme Judicial Court for actions commenced on or after January 1, 2020. Hampden County Superior Court is at 50 State Street in Springfield and serves every city and town in the county. Smaller matters go to the geographic District Court division: Springfield for Longmeadow, Springfield and West Springfield; Chicopee for Chicopee; Holyoke for Holyoke; Westfield for Agawam, Blandford, Chester, Granville, Montgomery, Russell, Southwick, Tolland and Westfield; and Palmer for Brimfield, East Longmeadow, Hampden, Holland, Ludlow, Monson, Palmer, Wales and Wilbraham.

Q: Do these numbers help prove my case?

A: Not directly. Fault is decided on the evidence of the specific collision, and a road’s crash history does not establish that any particular driver was careless. Where the data helps is practical: it identifies the corridors where sight lines, signal timing, maintenance records and prior complaints are worth requesting early, and it tells you which courthouse the case will be in.

Q: Where does this crash data come from, and how current is it?

A: MassDOT’s open crash data, the record built from Massachusetts crash reports, covering calendar years 2022 through 2024, including the fatal-crash counts. Road-level counts are for 2024, the most recent complete year in the dataset. Court service lists and addresses were read from the Massachusetts Trial Court’s own location pages on mass.gov. The underlying crash data is refreshed on this site monthly, and the per-town figures are published at /crash-report so any number in this article can be checked against its source.

Q: Is Jimmy Knows AI giving me legal advice?

A: No. This is general information about Massachusetts law and public 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. For advice about your own case, speak with a lawyer.