Which Massachusetts Communities Have the Most Intersection Crashes?

Lowell, and by a clear margin. Of the 7,781 crashes MassDOT recorded in Lowell from 2022 through 2024, 3,966 happened at an intersection, which is 50.97 per cent. No other Massachusetts community with a meaningful crash volume crosses half. Lawrence is second at 49.62 per cent and Brockton third at 49.23 per cent. The statewide figure is 34.46 per cent, so about one Massachusetts crash in three is at a junction, and in Lowell it is one in two. The most surprising entry is at the other end of the table: Boston records more crashes than any community in the state, 17,407, and the lowest intersection share of the thirty largest at 29.76 per cent. Every figure here comes from MassDOT crash records and can be checked community by community in the Massachusetts crash report. To talk through a specific crash, 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 Counts as an Intersection in This Data

Every Massachusetts crash record carries a field describing the junction it happened at, and it is more precise than most people expect. The categories are four-way intersection, T-intersection, Y-intersection, five-point or more, driveway, on-ramp, off-ramp, traffic circle, railway grade crossing, and not at a junction at all.

This article counts the first four of those as an intersection. A driveway, a highway ramp and a rotary are junctions in the source data, and they behave differently enough that folding them in would blur the finding, so they are reported separately and excluded from the intersection figure. That decision matters most for rotaries, which Massachusetts has more of than most states. Across 2022 through 2024 the state recorded 5,844 traffic circle crashes, 8,658 at driveways and 14,549 on ramps. The driveway category is broken down community by community in Massachusetts driveway crash data, where it turns out to concentrate in a very different set of places from the intersection figures below.

The three-year statewide picture is this. Of 405,239 crashes, 231,199, or 57.05 per cent, were not at a junction. 139,661, or 34.46 per cent, were at one of the four intersection types. The share barely moves from year to year: 34.27 per cent in 2022, 34.54 in 2023, 34.58 in 2024.

One limit belongs here rather than in a footnote. Crash records count collisions. They carry no measure of how many vehicles passed through a place, so nothing in this article can say whether a given intersection is more dangerous per trip than a given stretch of road. What it can say is where the burden falls, which is a different and still useful question.

Answer Capsule

Lowell has the highest intersection crash share of any large Massachusetts community. MassDOT records 3,966 of Lowell’s 7,781 crashes from 2022 through 2024 at a four-way, T, Y or five-point intersection, 50.97 per cent, against a statewide 34.46 per cent. Lawrence follows at 49.62 per cent, Brockton at 49.23, Springfield at 46.39, Leominster at 46.29, Lynn at 43.99, New Bedford at 43.36 and Holyoke at 42.19. All eight of those are Gateway Cities under M.G.L. c. 23A, sec. 3A, though the designation does not predict the measure, because Methuen at 31.68 per cent and Peabody at 28.72 per cent are Gateway Cities near the bottom of the same table. Boston is the outlier: the largest crash total in the state at 17,407 and the lowest intersection share of the thirty largest communities at 29.76 per cent. Taken together, the thirty communities with 3,000 or more crashes run 38.69 per cent against 31.15 per cent for the rest of Massachusetts. Bicycle crashes concentrate at intersections far more than crashes generally, 59.00 per cent against the 34.46 per cent baseline, and pedestrian crashes at 45.72 per cent. The law that decides fault at these locations is M.G.L. c. 89, sec. 8 and sec. 9. This is general information about public crash data and Massachusetts law, not legal advice. Call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS; the first telephone consultation is offered without charge.

The Thirty Largest Crash Communities, Ranked by Intersection Share

Every Massachusetts community that recorded 3,000 or more crashes from 2022 through 2024, ordered by the share of those crashes that happened at an intersection. The rank column is the community’s position among all 349 Massachusetts communities by total crashes.

Community	Intersection crashes	All crashes	Intersection share	Rank by volume	Fatal crashes
Lowell	3,966	7,781	50.97%	6	10
Lawrence	2,672	5,385	49.62%	11	5
Brockton	3,632	7,378	49.23%	7	20
Springfield	5,153	11,109	46.39%	3	44
Leominster	1,640	3,543	46.29%	22	4
Lynn	2,672	6,074	43.99%	10	9
New Bedford	4,800	11,070	43.36%	4	14
Holyoke	1,791	4,245	42.19%	18	12
Cambridge	1,975	4,774	41.37%	15	7
Framingham	1,746	4,359	40.06%	16	9
Waltham	1,711	4,333	39.49%	17	6
Quincy	2,538	6,455	39.32%	9	7
Barnstable	1,435	3,703	38.75%	21	13
Attleboro	1,234	3,234	38.16%	29	4
Fitchburg	1,291	3,424	37.70%	23	2
Worcester	5,798	15,598	37.17%	2	29
Taunton	2,456	6,644	36.97%	8	12
Chicopee	1,932	5,238	36.88%	12	22
Fall River	3,313	9,045	36.63%	5	11
Newton	1,797	4,924	36.49%	13	4
Weymouth	1,203	3,384	35.55%	26	5
Marlborough	1,178	3,390	34.75%	25	3
Woburn	1,076	3,144	34.22%	30	8
Haverhill	1,633	4,815	33.91%	14	4
Methuen	1,080	3,409	31.68%	24	8
Boston	5,181	17,407	29.76%	1	65
Medford	1,165	3,984	29.24%	19	5
West Springfield	949	3,277	28.96%	28	6
Peabody	1,076	3,746	28.72%	20	5
Andover	835	3,302	25.29%	27	9

Read as a group, these thirty communities recorded 68,928 intersection crashes out of 178,174, a share of 38.69 per cent, against 31.15 per cent across the remaining 319 communities. Bigger places put more of their crashes at junctions, which is unsurprising. What is worth attention is the spread inside the group. The distance from Lowell at 50.97 per cent to Andover at 25.29 per cent is more than two to one, and both of those are communities of comparable crash volume in the same corner of the state.

Lowell, Where Half of Everything Happens at a Junction

Lowell records 7,781 crashes over three years, sixth highest in Massachusetts, and 3,966 of them at an intersection. That is the only figure above 50 per cent in the table, and it holds up against the town’s other numbers rather than looking like a reporting artefact: Lowell also records 1,765 injury crashes, 179 involving a pedestrian and 99 involving a bicycle, on 10 fatal crashes across the three years.

A city where more than half the crashes happen at junctions is a city where the fault questions are almost all right-of-way questions. That is a meaningfully different claim profile from a town whose crash burden sits on a highway, where the arguments tend to be about following distance and lane changes. It also means that in Lowell, more often than not, there is a traffic control device in the picture, and its state and its timing are facts somebody can establish. The full picture for the town, including its highest-crash roads by name, is at the Lowell crash report, and the practice-area page is Lowell auto accidents.

Lawrence at 49.62 per cent and Brockton at 49.23 per cent sit just under the same line. Brockton is the one to look at twice, because it pairs a near-half intersection share with 20 fatal crashes and 2,604 injury crashes, the second-largest injury count in the table behind Boston. Brockton auto accidents and the Brockton crash report carry the rest.

Boston Is the Counter-Example, and It Is Not Close

Boston has the most crashes of any Massachusetts community by a wide margin, 17,407 against Worcester’s 15,598. It has the lowest intersection share of the thirty largest at 29.76 per cent, which is below not only the big-community average of 38.69 per cent but below the 31.15 per cent recorded across the rest of the state.

The reading that fits is INFERRED rather than proven, and it is worth stating as such. Boston’s crash burden is unusually concentrated on limited-access and grade-separated roads, which by definition are not junctions: the city’s own highest-crash roads for 2024 are Interstate 93 in both directions, Storrow Drive, both carriageways of the Massachusetts Turnpike, Morrissey Boulevard, Soldiers Field Road and the Tobin Bridge. Several of those belong to the Department of Conservation and Recreation rather than to the city, which changes the deadlines on any claim about the road itself, and that is set out in the Massachusetts state parkway crash data. What is proven here is the count. The explanation is a reading of it.

Medford at 29.24 per cent, West Springfield at 28.96 and Peabody at 28.72 sit in the same low band, and all three are communities whose listed roads are dominated by an interstate or a state highway rather than by a downtown grid.

Gateway Cities Occupy the Top of the Table, but Not Because They Are Gateway Cities

All eight of the highest-share communities are Gateway Cities as defined by M.G.L. c. 23A, sec. 3A: Lowell, Lawrence, Brockton, Springfield, Leominster, Lynn, New Bedford and Holyoke. That is a striking run and it is worth naming.

It is not, however, a finding about the designation. Eighteen of the thirty communities in the table are Gateway Cities, and they are spread across the whole range. Methuen at 31.68 per cent, Peabody at 28.72 per cent and Haverhill at 33.91 per cent are all Gateway Cities sitting below the statewide 34.46 per cent. The designation is an economic one, resting on population, median household income and bachelor’s-degree attainment, and it does not describe a street network. The reading that survives is simpler and INFERRED from the pattern rather than proved by it: dense, older street grids laid out before the automobile produce more junctions per mile, and more junctions per mile produce a higher share of crashes at them. The wider crash profile of those 26 communities, on measures this article does not use, is in the Gateway Cities crash data.

For Cyclists and Pedestrians the Concentration Is Much Sharper

The intersection share of crashes rises steeply once the crash involves somebody who is not in a vehicle.

Of the 4,356 Massachusetts crashes involving a bicycle from 2022 through 2024, 2,570 were at an intersection. That is 59.00 per cent, against the 34.46 per cent baseline for crashes generally, and only 33.06 per cent of bicycle crashes were away from a junction. The T-intersection is the single largest category for cyclists at 1,409 crashes, ahead of the four-way at 1,047, which is a different ordering from the all-vehicle data where the four-way leads.

Of the 5,980 crashes involving a pedestrian, 2,734, or 45.72 per cent, were at an intersection, and 2,853, or 47.71 per cent, were not at a junction. A further 181 were at driveways.

Cambridge is the community where those two facts meet. It records 384 bicycle crashes across three years, the largest count in the state, alongside an intersection share of 41.37 per cent and 220 pedestrian crashes. For a cyclist in Cambridge the relevant collision is overwhelmingly a junction collision. Which communities carry the most bicycle crashes overall is in the Massachusetts city with the most bicycle crashes, and the pedestrian distribution is in Massachusetts pedestrian crash data. The rules a cyclist is operating under at a junction are the same right-of-way statutes that govern drivers.

More Injuries, Fewer Deaths

Intersections are not where Massachusetts crashes are most likely to be fatal. Across the three-year file, 277 of the 139,661 intersection crashes were fatal, a rate of 1.98 per 1,000, while 758 of the 231,199 crashes away from a junction were fatal, a rate of 3.28 per 1,000. The statewide rate is 2.68.

Injuries run the opposite way. 26.85 per cent of intersection crashes recorded an injury, against 20.99 per cent away from a junction and 22.89 per cent statewide.

That pair is the honest summary of what a junction does. It puts vehicles on crossing paths at speeds high enough to hurt people and low enough that most of them survive. The manner of collision confirms it: 43.29 per cent of intersection crashes are recorded as angle collisions, against 12.85 per cent away from a junction, where the leading category is the single vehicle crash at 30.02 per cent. The statewide version of that ranking, with how often each collision type injures and kills, is in what is the most common type of car crash in Massachusetts. How injury crashes are distributed across the state on other measures is in Massachusetts injury crash data.

The junction share also moves with the light. Intersections account for 36.49 per cent of crashes in daylight and 30.96 per cent after dark, and the severity gap between the two conditions is far wider than anything in this article: the fatal rate runs from 1.81 per 1,000 in daylight to 8.49 on an unlit road at night. That cut is set out in are Massachusetts crashes more dangerous at night.

The Law That Decides These Cases

A crash at an intersection is decided by two statutes that do not apply the same way anywhere else. M.G.L. c. 89, sec. 8 carries the right-of-way rules: the driver on the left yields to the driver on the right when two vehicles arrive at approximately the same instant, a driver turning left across oncoming traffic yields until the turn can be made with reasonable safety, and a driver entering a rotary yields to traffic already in it. M.G.L. c. 89, sec. 9 carries the sign rules, including one that can decide a case on its own: where a driver passes a yield sign without stopping and then collides with a vehicle in the intersection, the collision “shall be deemed prima facie evidence of his failure to yield the right of way.”

Fault is then apportioned under M.G.L. c. 231, sec. 85, which is why so many intersection cases turn into arguments about shares rather than about blame. The full treatment of the statutes, with the text quoted, is in who is at fault in a Massachusetts intersection accident, and the way percentages work is in comparative negligence and partial fault.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Which Massachusetts city has the most intersection crashes?

A: By share, Lowell, where 3,966 of 7,781 crashes from 2022 through 2024 were at an intersection, 50.97 per cent. By raw count, Worcester with 5,798, then Boston with 5,181 and Springfield with 5,153, because those communities record far more crashes in total.

Q: What percentage of Massachusetts crashes happen at intersections?

A: 34.46 per cent. MassDOT records 139,661 of 405,239 crashes from 2022 through 2024 at a four-way, T, Y or five-point intersection, and 231,199, or 57.05 per cent, not at a junction at all. The remainder are driveways, ramps, traffic circles and railway grade crossings.

Q: Why does Boston have a low intersection share when it has the most crashes?

A: The count is 5,181 of 17,407, or 29.76 per cent, the lowest of the thirty largest communities. The explanation that fits, and it is an inference rather than a proven cause, is that Boston’s crash burden is concentrated on limited-access roads that are not junctions. Its highest-crash roads for 2024 are Interstate 93 in both directions, Storrow Drive, both carriageways of the Massachusetts Turnpike, Morrissey Boulevard, Soldiers Field Road and the Tobin Bridge.

Q: Are intersection crashes more serious than other crashes?

A: They injure more often and kill less often. 26.85 per cent of intersection crashes recorded an injury against 20.99 per cent of crashes away from a junction. The fatal rate runs the other way at 1.98 per 1,000 against 3.28 per 1,000, with a statewide figure of 2.68.

Q: Are Massachusetts rotaries counted in these numbers?

A: No. Traffic circles are a separate category in the source and are excluded from the intersection figure here so the comparison stays clean. For the record, they recorded 5,844 crashes and 4 fatal across the three years, a rate of 0.68 per 1,000, the lowest of any junction type in the file.

Q: Do cyclists get hit at intersections more often than drivers?

A: Considerably more often as a share. 2,570 of 4,356 bicycle crashes, 59.00 per cent, were at an intersection, against a 34.46 per cent baseline for all crashes. For pedestrians the figure is 45.72 per cent. The T-intersection is the largest single category for cyclists, which is a different ordering from the all-vehicle data.

Q: Which intersection in Massachusetts has the most crashes?

A: This data cannot answer that and the article does not guess. The junction field records that a crash was at an intersection; it does not identify which one, and the road-name field in the source is too fragmented to reconstruct a reliable intersection ranking. Community-level figures are as fine-grained as the published data supports.

Q: Where do these numbers come from?

A: MassDOT IMPACT open crash records for calendar years 2022, 2023 and 2024, pulled on 2026-09-19 and committed to this site’s repository at measurement/junction-crash-pull-2026-09-19.json and measurement/junction-by-town-2026-09-19.json. The per-community totals match the figures already published on the town pages in the Massachusetts crash report.

Q: Is Jimmy Knows AI giving me legal advice?

A: No. This is general legal and public-safety information about Massachusetts crash data, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney client relationship. Crash statistics describe patterns across many collisions and say nothing about who was at fault in any particular one. To discuss a specific crash, call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS. The line is answered 24 hours a day. The first telephone consultation is offered without charge.

Talking to a Lawyer

A community’s intersection share is not a curiosity. It tells you what kind of evidence is likely to matter where you live.

In Lowell, Lawrence, Brockton or Springfield, where close to half of all crashes are at a junction, the decisive facts are usually about control and timing: which signal phase was running, whether a sign was present and visible, which vehicle entered first, and whether a turning driver had a protected phase or only a circular green. Those facts live in signal records, in nearby camera footage and in the memories of people who were waiting at the same light, and all three decay quickly.

In Boston, Medford or Andover, where the crash burden sits on highways and parkways, the questions are different: lane position, following distance, merging, and, where the road itself is in issue, who owns it, because a claim about the condition of a state-owned parkway runs on a different and shorter timetable than a claim against another driver.

In either case, the sooner somebody fixes the scene in writing and in photographs, the less the case depends on recollection.

Fee arrangements in injury work are usually contingent, meaning no fee unless there is a recovery, and the client may be responsible for costs and expenses.

Jim Glaser Law can be reached at (617) JIM-WINS. The line is answered 24 hours a day. The first telephone consultation is offered without charge.