Where Do Crashes Happen on the Massachusetts Turnpike?

Nine of the 349 Massachusetts communities recorded a stretch of Interstate 90 among their highest-crash roads in 2024, and those stretches produced 247 crashes in that single year, according to MassDOT crash records. Almost half of them, 121, were in Boston. Weston came second with 62 across four separate segment entries, then Charlton at 15, Ludlow at 12, Framingham at 10, Palmer at 9, Auburn at 8, and Oxford and Millbury tied at 5. The more revealing finding is what the Turnpike is missing from. MassDOT’s statewide list of the highest-crash roads in 2024 runs to 24 entries and reaches down to roads with 209 crashes, and Interstate 90 is not on it anywhere. Yet on the statewide list of roads with the most fatal crashes that year, the Turnpike westbound is tied for second. That combination, absent from the volume list and near the top of the fatal list, is the whole story of this road. Every figure here 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 on the corridor, call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS. The line is answered 24 hours a day. The first telephone consultation is offered without charge.

What the Data Calls the Road

The Massachusetts Turnpike is the state’s main east-west route, running from the New York state line in the Berkshires across the state through Springfield, Worcester and MetroWest into Boston. In MassDOT’s crash records it does not appear under a single tidy name. It shows up as MASSACHUSETTS TURNPIKE with the route designation I90, and also as bare I90 with a direction suffix, in at least four written forms across the nine towns: I90 E, I90 W, I90 EB, and MASSACHUSETTS TURNPIKE Rte I90.

That matters more than it sounds, because the word “turnpike” is doing other work all over Massachusetts. Boston Turnpike is Route 9 in Shrewsbury and Westborough. Newburyport Turnpike is US 1 in Peabody. Concord Turnpike is Route 2. Middlesex Turnpike runs through Burlington. There is a plain Turnpike Street in North Andover, Easton, Canton and Stoughton. Every one of those carries real crashes and none of them is Interstate 90. The figures in this article count only segments the data explicitly designates I90, which is why the numbers here are smaller than a casual search on the word would produce.

Nine Towns and 247 Crashes

Here is where Interstate 90 registered in 2024, with each town’s own internal ranking of that segment in brackets, because a highway that is a town’s first-ranked road is telling you something quite different from one that is its eighth.

• Boston, 121 crashes. Turnpike westbound at 67 is the city’s fourth highest-crash road and eastbound at 54 is its fifth.
• Weston, 62 crashes across four separate segment entries, ranked second, third, fourth and eighth in the town.
• Charlton, 15 crashes. Third in town.
• Ludlow, 12 crashes. Fifth in town.
• Framingham, 10 crashes. Seventh in town.
• Palmer, 9 crashes. Third in town.
• Auburn, 8 crashes. Eighth in town.
• Oxford, 5 crashes. Eighth in town.
• Millbury, 5 crashes. First in town, which says less about the Turnpike than about Millbury, a community of 849 crashes over three years where no road produces a large number.

The highway physically passes through more communities than nine. What the nine represent is the places where it produced enough crashes in one year to reach that town’s own top-road list. In every other community along its length, some surface street outranked it.

Answer Capsule

Nine of the 349 Massachusetts communities recorded an Interstate 90 segment among their highest-crash roads in 2024, and those segments totalled 247 crashes that year, per MassDOT crash records. Boston accounts for 121 of the 247, or 49 per cent, with the Turnpike westbound its fourth highest-crash road at 67 and eastbound its fifth at 54. Weston follows at 62 across four segment entries, then Charlton 15, Ludlow 12, Framingham 10, Palmer 9, Auburn 8, and Oxford and Millbury at 5 each. Interstate 90 does not appear anywhere on MassDOT’s statewide list of highest-crash roads for 2024, a 24-entry list led by Main Street at 2,672 and reaching down to roads with 209 crashes. It does appear on the statewide fatal-crash road list, where Interstate 495 northbound leads at 9 and four roads tie behind it at 3, one of them the Turnpike westbound. Across the nine communities, MassDOT recorded 32,651 crashes from 2022 through 2024, including 108 fatal, 7,872 involving injury, 379 involving a bicycle and 619 involving a pedestrian, which is 8.06 per cent of the statewide total of 405,245. Boston alone is 53 per cent of that nine-town figure, so the honest comparison excludes it: the other eight communities recorded 15,244 crashes and 43 fatal, a rate of 2.82 fatal per 1,000 against a statewide 2.68. Within the corridor the fatality rate varies more than fivefold, from Charlton at 6.3 fatal per 1,000 and Oxford at 4.7 down to Millbury at 1.2 and Weston at 1.3. The nine towns span four counties, so cases are heard at Suffolk Superior Court, 3 Pemberton Square in Boston; Middlesex Superior Court, 200 Trade Center in Woburn; Worcester Superior Court, 225 Main Street in Worcester; or Hampden Superior Court, 50 State Street in Springfield. Call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS; the first telephone consultation is free.

Missing From One List, Near the Top of the Other

This is the finding worth sitting with.

MassDOT publishes a statewide ranking of individual roads by crash count for the most recent year. The 2024 list has 24 entries. It is led by Main Street at 2,672 crashes, Washington Street at 1,118 and Pleasant Street at 633, which are not single roads at all but the same common street names aggregated across many towns. Interstate 93 northbound is fourth at 444 and southbound eighth at 359. Interstate 495 northbound is on it at 232. The list runs all the way down to Summer Street at 209 crashes.

Interstate 90 is not on that list at any position.

MassDOT also publishes a statewide ranking of roads by fatal crashes. That 2024 list has 19 entries. Interstate 495 northbound leads it at 9 fatal crashes. Behind it, four roads are tied at 3: Interstate 93 northbound, the Massachusetts Turnpike westbound, Route 3 southbound, and a road recorded simply as South Street. The Turnpike is one of that four-way tie, so it is tied for second rather than outright third.

A road that generates too few crashes to make a 24-entry volume list, while generating enough fatal crashes to tie for second on a 19-entry fatality list, is behaving in a specific and well-understood way. Limited-access highway design removes the things that cause most crashes: no cross traffic, no pedestrians, no driveways, no left turns across oncoming lanes, no parked cars opening doors. What it does not remove is speed. So the count goes down and the severity of what remains goes up.

That is not a claim about how any particular collision happened. It is what the two lists, read together, describe. The same reading applied to the state’s other major highways produces different shapes: Interstate 495 tops the fatal list outright, Interstate 93 is high on both lists at once, Route 128 behaves like an urban arterial in places, and Route 24 is absent from the fatal list while running through towns with very high fatality rates. Route 9, which parallels the Turnpike for much of its length as a surface road, produces a fourth shape again: it is the highest-crash road in most of the towns it crosses.

The Fatality Spread Along the Corridor

The nine communities aggregate to 32,651 crashes over the three years, with 108 fatal, 7,872 involving injury, 379 involving a bicycle and 619 involving a pedestrian. That is 8.06 per cent of the 405,245 crashes recorded statewide and 9.94 per cent of the state’s 1,087 fatal crashes.

Those aggregate numbers need a caveat stated plainly rather than buried, because Boston is 17,407 of the 32,651, which is 53 per cent of the total. A corridor statistic that is more than half one city is really a statistic about that city. Excluding Boston, the other eight communities recorded 15,244 crashes and 43 fatal crashes, a rate of 2.82 fatal per 1,000 against the statewide 2.68. That is the more honest comparison, and it puts the corridor a little above the state average rather than well above it.

The internal spread is wider than either aggregate suggests, and it does not follow crash volume:

Community	3yr crashes	Fatal	Injury	Fatal per 1,000	Statewide crash rank
Charlton	1,751	11	392	6.3	59th
Oxford	1,063	5	229	4.7	112th
Boston	17,407	65	4,533	3.7	1st
Ludlow	1,604	6	316	3.7	72nd
Palmer	1,090	4	252	3.7	108th
Framingham	4,359	9	1,042	2.1	16th
Auburn	2,247	4	481	1.8	42nd
Weston	2,281	3	443	1.3	41st
Millbury	849	1	184	1.2	136th

Charlton is the striking entry. It ranks 59th statewide for total crashes, well outside the busiest communities, and yet recorded 11 fatal crashes over the three years, more than Framingham, which had two and a half times as many crashes. Its rate of 6.3 fatal per 1,000 is more than double the state figure.

Two cautions belong with that. First, small numbers move a long way on a single additional death, and Charlton’s 11 sits on a base of 1,751 crashes. Second, a town’s fatality count covers every road in the town, not only the Turnpike. What the pattern shows is that the rural middle stretch of the corridor, through Charlton, Oxford, Palmer and Ludlow, carries higher severity per crash than the eastern end, which is the same pattern the Route 24 corridor shows and the same one the design of a high-speed road through low-density country would predict.

Which Court Hears a Turnpike Case

The nine communities are spread across four counties, which is unusual even for a corridor and is a practical consequence people do not anticipate.

Boston is Suffolk County, heard at Suffolk Superior Court, 3 Pemberton Square. Weston and Framingham are Middlesex County, heard at Middlesex Superior Court, 200 Trade Center in Woburn. Auburn, Charlton, Oxford and Millbury are Worcester County, heard at Worcester Superior Court, 225 Main Street. Ludlow and Palmer are Hampden County, heard at Hampden Superior Court, 50 State Street in Springfield.

A crash on a single continuous road can therefore be litigated in Woburn or in Springfield depending on which side of a county line it happened on, and neither is likely to be the county the driver lives in. Whether a case proceeds in District Court or Superior Court turns on the amount in dispute, and that dividing amount has changed over time, so it is worth confirming for a current case.

Each of the four counties has its own crash profile, set out in the Suffolk, Middlesex, Worcester and Hampden county pieces.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How many crashes happen on the Massachusetts Turnpike each year?

A: MassDOT recorded 247 crashes in 2024 on the Interstate 90 segments that reached the top-road list of the nine Massachusetts communities where the highway registered. That is not a count of every crash on the whole length of the Turnpike, because segments that did not reach a given town’s top-road list are not captured in this data. It is the figure the published road-level data supports, and it is why the more reliable comparison in this article is between the statewide volume list and the statewide fatality list rather than a single total.

Q: Which town has the most Turnpike crashes in Massachusetts?

A: Boston, at 121 in 2024, which is 49 per cent of the 247 recorded across all nine communities. The Turnpike westbound is the city’s fourth highest-crash road at 67 crashes and eastbound is its fifth at 54. Weston is second at 62 across four separate segment entries, which is notable because Weston is a much smaller community and the highway ranks second, third, fourth and eighth among all its roads.

Q: Is the Massachusetts Turnpike more dangerous than other roads in the state?

A: The data supports a more specific statement than dangerous or safe. Interstate 90 does not appear anywhere on MassDOT’s 24-entry statewide list of highest-crash roads for 2024, a list that reaches down to roads with 209 crashes. It does appear on the statewide fatal-crash list, tied for second at 3 fatal crashes behind Interstate 495 northbound at 9. Fewer crashes, and a higher share of the ones that happen being fatal, is the pattern a limited-access highway produces: cross traffic, pedestrians, driveways and turning movements are engineered out, and speed is not.

Q: Why does Charlton have so many fatal crashes?

A: Charlton recorded 11 fatal crashes from 2022 through 2024 on a base of 1,751 total crashes, a rate of 6.3 fatal per 1,000 against a statewide 2.68. It ranks only 59th of 349 communities for total crashes, so this is a severity pattern rather than a volume one, and it fits the rural middle of the corridor, where Oxford at 4.7 and Ludlow and Palmer at 3.7 also run above the state rate. Two things are worth keeping in mind. A town’s fatality count covers all of its roads, not only the Turnpike. And at these small numbers a single additional death moves the rate noticeably.

Q: Which court would hear a Massachusetts Turnpike crash case?

A: It depends which town the crash happened in, because the nine communities span four counties. Boston is Suffolk County, heard at Suffolk Superior Court, 3 Pemberton Square. Weston and Framingham are Middlesex County, heard at Middlesex Superior Court, 200 Trade Center in Woburn. Auburn, Charlton, Oxford and Millbury are Worcester County, heard at Worcester Superior Court, 225 Main Street. Ludlow and Palmer are Hampden County, heard at Hampden Superior Court, 50 State Street in Springfield.

Q: Can I bring a claim over the condition of the highway itself?

A: Claims against a public body over the condition of a road are treated very differently from claims against another driver. Under M.G.L. c. 84, sec. 15, damages against a county, city, town or other party obliged to repair a way are capped at the lesser of one fifth of one per cent of its state valuation or five thousand dollars, and the body must have had, or by the exercise of proper care and diligence might have had, reasonable notice of the defect. Those claims also carry their own notice requirements with short deadlines. The practical result is that road-condition claims are narrow and time-sensitive, and the claim against another driver is usually the substantial one.

Q: Where does this crash data come from and can I check it?

A: MassDOT’s open crash data, the public record built from Massachusetts crash reports, covering calendar years 2022, 2023 and 2024. Fatal counts come from those same MassDOT records. Road-level counts are for 2024 alone, the most recent complete year. Town-level totals are published for every Massachusetts community clearing the dataset’s threshold at the Massachusetts crash report, and every figure above can be checked against the Boston, Framingham, Weston, Auburn, Charlton, Ludlow, Palmer, Oxford and Millbury town pages.

Q: Does the crash history of a road affect my claim?

A: Not directly. Fault is decided from the evidence of the particular collision, and under M.G.L. c. 231, sec. 85 damages are reduced in proportion to each party’s share of the negligence, with recovery barred only once your share is greater than the combined share of those you claim against, which is set out in how comparative negligence works in Massachusetts. Crash history can matter as context, and it can matter more in a claim against a road authority, which carries its own notice requirements and the damages cap described above; those claims are covered in suing a government body in Massachusetts. It is never a substitute for the crash report, the photographs and the medical records.

Q: Is Jimmy Knows AI giving me legal advice?

A: No. This is general information about Massachusetts crash data and Massachusetts law, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. The figures above describe patterns across three years and nine communities; they say nothing about any particular collision. For advice about a specific situation, call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS.

Talking to a Lawyer

The useful thing corridor data does is set expectations about the shape of the risk. On the Turnpike the shape is unusual: not many crashes for a road of its length and traffic, and a disproportionate share of the ones that happen being serious. It cannot tell you what any individual claim is worth or who was at fault, because those come from the crash report, the medical records, the photographs and the insurance policies actually in play.

What Turnpike cases do tend to involve is speed, which means more serious injuries and higher medical bills; commercial vehicles, which means commercial policies and a different set of records to obtain; and county lines, which means the case may run in a court a long way from where the driver lives.

Jim Glaser Law handles injury claims along the whole length of the corridor, from Boston and Framingham at the eastern end, through Worcester and the small Worcester County towns in the middle, out to Springfield and the western end. Fees are contingent, meaning no fee unless there is a recovery, and the client may be responsible for costs and expenses.

The number is (617) JIM-WINS. The line is answered 24 hours a day. The first telephone consultation is offered without charge.