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

Across the fifty-four cities and towns of Middlesex County, Massachusetts recorded 83,203 crashes from 2022 through 2024, including 168 fatal crashes, 17,733 crashes involving injury, 1,459 involving a bicycle, and 1,397 involving a pedestrian. That is 20.5 percent of every crash in the Commonwealth, which is roughly what you would expect from the state’s largest county by number of municipalities. One number is not what you would expect. Middlesex County accounts for 33.5 percent of every bicycle crash in Massachusetts, a share half again as large as its share of crashes overall, and it contains four of the state’s ten highest bicycle-crash communities. Cambridge alone recorded 384 bicycle crashes, more than Boston’s 273, and ranks first among all 349 Massachusetts communities. At the same time the county is, by the measure that matters most, safer than the state as a whole: 2.02 fatal crashes per 1,000 crashes against a statewide 2.68. 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 Fifty-Four Communities, and Where the Numbers Come From

Middlesex County covers fifty-four cities and towns: Acton, Arlington, Ashby, Ashland, Ayer, Bedford, Belmont, Billerica, Boxborough, Burlington, Cambridge, Carlisle, Chelmsford, Concord, Dracut, Dunstable, Everett, Framingham, Groton, Holliston, Hopkinton, Hudson, Lexington, Lincoln, Littleton, Lowell, Malden, Marlborough, Maynard, Medford, Melrose, Natick, Newton, North Reading, Pepperell, Reading, Sherborn, Shirley, Somerville, Stoneham, Stow, Sudbury, Tewksbury, Townsend, Tyngsborough, Wakefield, Waltham, Watertown, Wayland, Westford, Weston, Wilmington, Winchester, and Woburn.

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 about what follows, 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 Middlesex towns carry very large volumes of traffic that begins and ends somewhere else. That is a genuine limitation of the data. It is also why the ratio comparisons later in this piece, which hold volume constant, carry more information than the raw counts.

Six of these towns also appear in the Merrimack Valley crash data piece, because that region crosses county lines. This piece is the county view, which is the one that determines where a case is heard. The county immediately to the west runs the numbers the other way on almost every measure below, and the contrast is worth reading against this one: see the Worcester County crash data. Cambridge and Somerville also sit next to the county with the state’s highest pedestrian exposure, which is covered in the Suffolk County crash data.

Where the Volume Is

Ranked by total crashes over the three years, Middlesex breaks into a broad upper tier rather than the sharp two-city pattern seen in some other counties.

Community	Crashes	Fatal	Injury	Statewide crash rank
Lowell	7,781	10	1,765	6th of 349
Newton	4,924	4	952	13th
Cambridge	4,774	7	1,097	15th
Framingham	4,359	9	1,042	16th
Waltham	4,333	6	767	17th
Medford	3,984	5	744	19th
Marlborough	3,390	3	603	25th
Woburn	3,144	8	689	30th
Malden	2,791	3	709	35th
Weston	2,281	3	443	41st
Chelmsford	2,108	11	546	49th
Somerville	1,999	0	625	52nd
Natick	1,997	1	318	53rd
Tewksbury	1,806	3	339	56th
Billerica	1,734	6	409	61st
Burlington	1,709	4	415	67th
Lexington	1,692	4	333	68th
Hopkinton	1,552	4	268	78th
Reading	1,534	1	241	81st
Wilmington	1,532	8	331	82nd

Lowell is the county’s clear volume leader and the sixth-busiest crash community in Massachusetts, behind Boston, Worcester, Springfield, New Bedford, and Fall River. Per-town figures for each of these communities, including their highest-crash roads, are on the individual pages such as Lowell, Cambridge, Framingham, and Woburn.

Weston deserves a note because its position on that list is unintuitive for a town of its size. It sits 41st in the state on 2,281 crashes while recording only 7 bicycle crashes and 3 pedestrian crashes across three years, the profile of a town whose crash count is generated almost entirely by high-speed through traffic rather than by local street activity.

The Finding: One County Holds a Third of the State’s Bicycle Crashes

This is the number that separates Middlesex from every other Massachusetts county.

Middlesex produced 1,459 of the 4,356 bicycle crashes recorded statewide over the three years. That is 33.5 percent of the state’s bicycle crashes in a county responsible for 20.5 percent of its crashes overall. Four of the ten highest bicycle-crash communities in Massachusetts are in this county.

Community	Bicycle crashes	Statewide bicycle rank
Cambridge	384	1st of 349
Somerville	144	3rd
Lowell	99	7th
Newton	83	9th
Medford	64	14th
Waltham	52	17th
Malden	51	18th
Arlington	47	24th
Belmont	39	28th
Lexington	38	29th

Cambridge is the state’s bicycle-crash capital by a wide margin. Its 384 bicycle crashes exceed Boston’s 273, and they exceed the combined totals of Springfield, Worcester, and New Bedford. Somerville, on 1,999 total crashes, recorded 144 bicycle crashes, meaning better than seven percent of every crash in that city involved a bicycle. The statewide figure is close to one percent.

There is a straightforward reading of this and it is worth saying plainly rather than dressing up. These are the densest, most bicycle-travelled municipalities in Massachusetts, and crash counts rise with exposure. A high bicycle-crash count is partly a measure of how many people ride. What the data cannot tell you, because it does not contain ridership figures, is the rate per rider. Anyone who reports these numbers as proof that Cambridge is the most dangerous place in Massachusetts to ride a bicycle is reading more into the dataset than the dataset holds.

What the numbers do establish is where bicycle collisions actually happen, which matters for anyone dealing with one. Local practice-area pages for these communities cover the specifics: bicycle accidents in Cambridge, in Somerville, and in Newton.

Answer Capsule

Middlesex County, Massachusetts recorded 83,203 crashes across its fifty-four cities and towns from 2022 through 2024, per MassDOT crash records: 168 fatal, 17,733 involving injury, 1,459 involving a bicycle, and 1,397 involving a pedestrian. That is 20.5 percent of the statewide three-year total of 405,245 crashes. Lowell is the county’s busiest at 7,781 crashes, sixth among all 349 Massachusetts communities, followed by Newton at 4,924, Cambridge at 4,774, Framingham at 4,359, and Waltham at 4,333. The county’s defining number is bicycles: it holds 33.5 percent of every bicycle crash in Massachusetts, well above its 20.5 percent share of crashes overall, with four of the state’s ten highest bicycle-crash communities. Cambridge ranks first statewide at 384, ahead of Boston’s 273; Somerville ranks third at 144. Fatal crashes run the other way. Middlesex produced 2.02 fatal crashes per 1,000 crashes against a statewide 2.68, and Somerville recorded 1,999 crashes with none fatal. The county’s fatalities concentrate in its highway towns: Chelmsford recorded 11 fatal crashes, more than Lowell, on roughly a quarter of Lowell’s volume, and Littleton’s 7 fatal crashes on 973 total is the highest ratio of any county community with more than one fatal crash, at 7.19 per 1,000. The highest 2024 count for a single named road was Main Street in Tewksbury at 169, measured across the thirty-four county communities the dataset carries road-level detail for, which are those recording at least 800 crashes over the three years. Civil cases are heard in Middlesex County Superior Court at 200 Trade Center in Woburn, or in the geographic District Court divisions, 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.

Pedestrians

The pedestrian pattern is less extreme but points the same way. Middlesex recorded 1,397 pedestrian crashes, 23.4 percent of the statewide total of 5,980, again above its 20.5 percent share of crashes. Cambridge ranks 4th in Massachusetts with 220 and Lowell 9th with 179, followed by Newton at 120, Malden at 104, Waltham at 84, and Medford at 83.

Marlborough is the counterpoint within the county. It recorded 3,390 crashes, 25th in the state, but only 25 pedestrian crashes and 27 bicycle crashes, ranking 49th and 39th in the state on those measures. Two communities can generate similar crash volume through completely different mechanisms, and the vulnerable-road-user counts are what separate them.

The Fatality Paradox

Middlesex County recorded 168 fatal crashes over the three years, which is 15.5 percent of the state’s 1,087. That is meaningfully below its 20.5 percent share of crashes. Expressed as a ratio, the county produced 2.02 fatal crashes per 1,000 crashes against a statewide 2.68.

This is what a dense, lower-speed, heavily urbanised road network looks like in crash statistics. More collisions, and a smaller proportion of them fatal. Somerville is the clearest illustration in the state: 1,999 crashes across three years and zero fatal crashes. Belmont recorded 935 crashes and none fatal. Hudson recorded 1,245 and none fatal.

The fatal crashes concentrate somewhere else, and the pattern is consistent enough to be worth naming.

Community	Fatal crashes	Total crashes	Fatal per 1,000 crashes
Chelmsford	11	2,108	5.22
Lowell	10	7,781	1.29
Framingham	9	4,359	2.06
Wilmington	8	1,532	5.22
Woburn	8	3,144	2.54
Cambridge	7	4,774	1.47
Littleton	7	973	7.19
Wakefield	7	1,328	5.27

Chelmsford recorded more fatal crashes than any other community in the county, including Lowell, on roughly a quarter of Lowell’s crash volume. Littleton produced 7 fatal crashes on 973 total, the highest ratio of any county community with more than one fatal crash at 7.19 per 1,000, more than five times Lowell’s 1.29. Ashby’s single fatal crash on 135 total works out to a nominally higher 7.41, on a base far too small to carry meaning.

What Chelmsford, Wilmington, Littleton, and Wakefield have in common is limited-access highway mileage. Chelmsford’s two highest-crash roads in 2024 were Interstate 495 northbound and southbound. Cambridge and Lowell, with the county’s densest street grids, sit at 1.47 and 1.29. The relationship between speed and outcome is not a subtle effect in this data.

The Roads

These are the highest 2024 counts, the most recent complete year, for individual named roads in the county. One limit belongs on the table before the table. The source data carries road-level detail only for communities clearing its threshold of 800 crashes over the three years, which in Middlesex County is thirty-four of the fifty-four: Acton, Arlington, Belmont, Billerica, Burlington, Cambridge, Chelmsford, Concord, Dracut, Everett, Framingham, Hopkinton, Hudson, Lexington, Littleton, Lowell, Malden, Marlborough, Medford, Melrose, Natick, Newton, Reading, Somerville, Stoneham, Tewksbury, Tyngsborough, Wakefield, Waltham, Watertown, Westford, Weston, Wilmington and Woburn. Those thirty-four account for 74,551 of the county’s 83,203 crashes. The other twenty towns have full town-level totals in the data, and every county figure above includes them, but no road breakdown, so a busy road in one of them would not appear below. The largest of those twenty, Sudbury, recorded 749 crashes across the whole three years, which puts a low ceiling on what any single road there could contribute, but the ranking should be read as covering the thirty-four rather than the fifty-four. They are not corridor totals either, so a road that runs through six towns appears six times in the underlying data rather than once.

Road	Community	2024 crashes
Main Street	Tewksbury	169
Boston Post Road East	Marlborough	99
Main Street	Woburn	78
Middlesex Road	Tyngsborough	75
Interstate 290, eastbound	Marlborough	65
Washington Street, westbound	Newton	64
Washington Street	Woburn	58
Mishawum Road	Woburn	55
Washington Street, eastbound	Newton	50
Main Street	Hudson	49
Main Street	Melrose	48
Speen Street	Natick	48
Lakeview Avenue	Dracut	46
Middlesex Street	Lowell	46
Main Street	Wakefield	46
Boston Road	Billerica	45

Two things stand out. Tewksbury’s Main Street, at 169 crashes in a single year, is the highest count on any one named road in the county’s road-level data, well clear of every other entry and more than six times Tewksbury’s own second-highest road. Woburn is the other standout: Main Street at 78 ranks third in the county, and Woburn also carries Washington Street at 58, Mishawum Road at 55, and Montvale Avenue at 43. That is a concentration of retail and highway-adjacent arterial traffic in a comparatively small city.

Newton’s Washington Street, counted in both directions, produced 114 crashes in 2024, the second-largest single-street total in that road-level data once direction is combined, behind Tewksbury’s Main Street. Burlington’s cluster is different again: Interstate 95 in both directions plus Cambridge Street and the Middlesex Turnpike, which is the signature of a retail district sitting directly on a limited-access highway interchange. Lowell’s pattern is a broad spread across many surface arterials rather than a single dominant road, consistent with its position as the county’s volume leader. Details for each are on the individual crash-report pages, including Lowell, Newton, Woburn, Burlington, and Chelmsford.

Motorcycle collisions on these arterials raise their own set of questions about fault and visibility, covered on the Lowell motorcycle accident page and in the article on Massachusetts motorcycle accident law.

Where a Middlesex County Crash Case Is Heard

Venue is the part of the county story the crash data cannot tell, and it is the part that matters procedurally.

Middlesex County Superior Court sits at 200 Trade Center in Woburn, and serves all fifty-four cities and towns of the county. The Middlesex Law Library occupies its third floor.

Whether a civil case belongs in Superior Court at all is a question of amount. M.G.L. c. 212, sec. 3 provides that an action may proceed in the Superior Court only if there is no reasonable likelihood that recovery by the plaintiff will be less than or equal to $25,000. A 2019 Supreme Judicial Court standing order raised that figure to $50,000 for civil actions for money damages commenced on or after January 1, 2020. Below that, the District Court is the ordinary venue.

The District Court divisions in Middlesex are organised geographically, and three of them are worth naming precisely because they cover the county’s highest-volume communities:

• Lowell District Court serves Billerica, Chelmsford, Dracut, Lowell, Tewksbury, and Tyngsborough. That is the county’s crash-volume leader plus the towns carrying its Interstate 495 mileage.
• Cambridge District Court, also known as the Third District Court of Middlesex, serves Arlington, Belmont, and Cambridge. Between them those three communities account for 470 of the county’s 1,459 bicycle crashes.
• Framingham District Court serves Ashland, Framingham, Holliston, Hopkinton, Sudbury, and Wayland, covering the Route 9 corridor in the county’s southwest.

Where a specific matter belongs depends on the amount in controversy and on where the parties and the events sit, which is a question for a lawyer rather than for a data page.

What These Numbers Do and Do Not Establish

Crash counts describe where collisions happened. They do not decide who was responsible for any one of them.

Massachusetts assigns fault case by case. Under M.G.L. c. 231, sec. 85, recovery is not barred where the claimant’s negligence was not greater than the total negligence attributable to the parties from whom recovery is sought, and damages are diminished in proportion to the claimant’s own share of fault. A crash on the busiest road in Woburn and a crash on the quietest road in Carlisle are analysed the same way, from the evidence in each. How that analysis actually runs is covered in how fault is determined in a Massachusetts car accident.

Nor does the local crash history change any deadline. M.G.L. c. 260, sec. 2A provides that actions of tort shall be commenced only within three years next after the cause of action accrues, everywhere in the Commonwealth.

What the numbers are genuinely good for is context. They show which corridors carry concentrated risk, which communities see a disproportionate share of bicycle and pedestrian collisions, and where the difference between a high-volume city and a high-fatality town actually lies. That is worth knowing before a crash rather than after.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How many car accidents happen in Middlesex County, Massachusetts each year?

A: MassDOT crash records show 83,203 crashes across the fifty-four communities of Middlesex County over the three years 2022 through 2024, an average of roughly 27,700 per year. Of those, 168 were fatal, 17,733 involved an injury, 1,459 involved a bicycle, and 1,397 involved a pedestrian. The county accounts for 20.5 percent of the statewide three-year total of 405,245 crashes.

Q: Which city in Middlesex County has the most car accidents?

A: Lowell, with 7,781 crashes over the three years, which also makes it the sixth-busiest crash community among all 349 in Massachusetts. Newton follows at 4,924, Cambridge at 4,774, Framingham at 4,359, and Waltham at 4,333.

Q: Where do the most bicycle accidents happen in Massachusetts?

A: Cambridge, which recorded 384 bicycle crashes over 2022 through 2024, ranking first among all 349 Massachusetts communities and exceeding Boston’s 273. Somerville ranks third statewide with 144. Middlesex County as a whole accounts for 1,459 of the 4,356 bicycle crashes recorded statewide, or 33.5 percent, and holds four of the state’s ten highest bicycle-crash communities. These counts reflect where collisions occurred, and because the data contains no ridership figures they should not be read as a crash rate per cyclist.

Q: Which Middlesex County town has the most fatal crashes?

A: Chelmsford, with 11 fatal crashes over the three years, ahead of Lowell’s 10 despite recording roughly a quarter of Lowell’s total crash volume. Measured as a ratio, Littleton is highest among the county communities with more than one fatal crash, at 7.19 fatal crashes per 1,000 crashes, against a county figure of 2.02 and a statewide figure of 2.68. Ashby’s single fatal crash on 135 total gives a nominally higher 7.41, on a base too small to mean much.

Q: Is Middlesex County more dangerous to drive in than the rest of Massachusetts?

A: Not by the measure most closely tied to outcome. Middlesex produced 2.02 fatal crashes per 1,000 crashes, below the statewide 2.68, and 15.5 percent of the state’s fatal crashes despite 20.5 percent of its crashes. It does have a higher share of bicycle and pedestrian collisions than its crash volume alone would predict. The pattern is consistent with dense urban road networks: more collisions, fewer of them fatal, and more of them involving people outside a vehicle.

Q: What are the highest-crash roads in Middlesex County?

A: In 2024, the single named road with the most crashes was Main Street in Tewksbury at 169, followed by Boston Post Road East in Marlborough at 99 and Main Street in Woburn at 78. Washington Street in Newton produced 114 across both directions. Others in the top tier include Middlesex Road in Tyngsborough at 75, Interstate 290 eastbound in Marlborough at 65, Washington Street in Woburn at 58, Mishawum Road in Woburn at 55, and Interstate 95 southbound in Burlington at 41. These are per-community counts for individual named roads, so a highway crossing several towns appears once per town in the source data, and the source carries road detail only for the thirty-four Middlesex communities clearing its threshold of 800 crashes over the three years, so the county’s twenty smaller towns are not represented in the road ranking.

Q: Which court handles a Middlesex County car accident case?

A: It depends on the amount in controversy. Middlesex County Superior Court sits at 200 Trade Center in Woburn and serves all fifty-four communities of the county. Under M.G.L. c. 212, sec. 3, an action may proceed in the Superior Court only where there is no reasonable likelihood that recovery will be less than or equal to $25,000, a figure a 2019 Supreme Judicial Court standing order raised to $50,000 for civil actions for money damages commenced on or after January 1, 2020. Smaller matters proceed in the District Court, whose divisions are geographic: Lowell District Court serves Billerica, Chelmsford, Dracut, Lowell, Tewksbury, and Tyngsborough; Cambridge District Court serves Arlington, Belmont, and Cambridge; and Framingham District Court serves Ashland, Framingham, Holliston, Hopkinton, Sudbury, and Wayland.

Q: How long do I have to bring a claim after a crash in Middlesex County?

A: The same period that applies everywhere in Massachusetts. M.G.L. c. 260, sec. 2A provides that actions of tort shall be commenced only within three years next after the cause of action accrues. Different rules apply to claims against a public employer, which are covered separately in the article on suing a government entity in Massachusetts.

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. Crash statistics describe where collisions happened; they do not determine responsibility for any particular collision, which is decided from the evidence in that case. For advice about a specific matter, speak with a Massachusetts attorney. The Jim Glaser Law line is answered 24 hours a day at (617) JIM-WINS, and the first telephone consultation is free.