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

Across the twenty-eight cities and towns of Norfolk County, Massachusetts recorded 41,894 crashes from 2022 through 2024, including 114 fatal crashes, 9,636 crashes involving injury, 363 involving a bicycle, and 573 involving a pedestrian. That is 10.3 percent of every crash in the Commonwealth. Measured by fatal crashes per 1,000 crashes, the county comes out at 2.72 against a statewide 2.68, which is to say it is average, and that average is the least useful number in this article. Divide the county along the boundaries that actually matter, the seven District Court catchments that decide where a case is heard, and the ratio runs from 1.88 in the Quincy district to 4.18 in the Wrentham district. The same county, the same three years, the same dataset, and a difference of more than a factor of two depending on which side of it you were driving on. 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-Eight Communities, and Where the Numbers Come From

Norfolk County covers twenty-eight cities and towns: Avon, Bellingham, Braintree, Brookline, Canton, Cohasset, Dedham, Dover, Foxborough, Franklin, Holbrook, Medfield, Medway, Millis, Milton, Needham, Norfolk, Norwood, Plainville, Quincy, Randolph, Sharon, Stoughton, Walpole, Wellesley, Westwood, Weymouth, and Wrentham.

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 Norfolk County towns carry very large volumes of through traffic on Interstate 93, Interstate 95, Route 1, Route 24 and Route 128. That is a genuine limitation of the data. It is also why the ratio comparisons in this piece, which hold 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
Quincy	6,455	7	1,308	9th of 349
Weymouth	3,384	5	860	26th
Randolph	2,606	4	488	37th
Braintree	2,536	9	759	38th
Stoughton	2,350	8	564	39th
Milton	2,135	8	715	48th
Wellesley	1,931	1	313	54th
Bellingham	1,717	4	287	64th
Foxborough	1,609	10	379	71st
Needham	1,546	4	287	80th

Quincy is the ninth highest-crash community in Massachusetts and accounts for 15 percent of its own county’s total. That is a much flatter distribution than the local series has found elsewhere: Worcester holds 26 percent of Worcester County’s crashes and Boston holds a comparable share of Suffolk’s. Norfolk County has no single dominant city. It has one large one, a row of substantial suburbs behind it, and then a long tail of towns in the southwest that individually look small and collectively are not.

Full three-year figures for the towns above are published at Quincy, Weymouth, Randolph, Braintree, Stoughton, Milton, Wellesley, Bellingham, Foxborough, and Needham.

The Fatal Crashes Are Somewhere Else Entirely

Strip Quincy out of the county and the picture inverts. Quincy recorded 6,455 crashes and 7 fatal, a ratio of 1.08 per 1,000. The other twenty-seven communities together recorded 35,439 crashes and 107 fatal, a ratio of 3.02. The busiest place in the county is also, by this measure, close to the safest place in the county.

Ranked by fatal crashes per 1,000 crashes, among Norfolk County communities recording at least 500 crashes over the three years:

Community	Crashes	Fatal	Fatal per 1,000
Plainville	736	5	6.79
Sharon	1,254	8	6.38
Foxborough	1,609	10	6.22
Dedham	1,413	8	5.66
Wrentham	1,067	5	4.69
Franklin	890	4	4.49
Milton	2,135	8	3.75
Braintree	2,536	9	3.55
Norwood	1,150	4	3.48
Stoughton	2,350	8	3.40

The 500-crash floor is there for a reason. Dover recorded 2 fatal crashes on 248 total, which computes to 8.06 per 1,000 and means very little at that sample size. Cohasset and Millis recorded no fatal crash at all across the three years, on 321 and 299 crashes respectively, and that means very little either.

Two towns on that list stand out against their own size. Foxborough recorded 10 fatal crashes, which ranks 15th among all 349 Massachusetts communities, while ranking only 71st for crashes overall. Sharon recorded 8, ranking 32nd for fatal crashes against 96th for crashes overall. Braintree at 9 ranks 20th, Stoughton, Milton and Dedham at 8 each rank 26th, 28th and 30th. Six Norfolk County towns therefore sit inside the statewide top thirty-two for fatal crashes, and only one of them, Braintree, is inside the top thirty-eight for crashes.

Answer Capsule

Norfolk County, Massachusetts recorded 41,894 crashes across its twenty-eight cities and towns from 2022 through 2024, per MassDOT crash records: 114 fatal, 9,636 involving injury, 363 involving a bicycle, and 573 involving a pedestrian. That is 10.3 percent of the statewide three-year total of 405,245 crashes. Quincy is the county’s busiest at 6,455 crashes, ninth among all 349 Massachusetts communities, followed by Weymouth at 3,384, Randolph at 2,606, Braintree at 2,536, and Stoughton at 2,350. The county’s fatal-crash ratio, 2.72 per 1,000 crashes, is almost identical to the statewide 2.68, but the average conceals the pattern completely: Quincy alone runs at 1.08 while the other twenty-seven communities together run at 3.02. Grouped by the District Court that hears each town’s cases, the ratio runs from 1.88 in the Quincy District Court catchment, through 2.92 in the Dedham catchment and 3.71 in the Stoughton catchment, to 4.18 in the Wrentham catchment, a coastal-to-inland gradient of more than a factor of two. Among communities recording at least 500 crashes, Plainville is highest at 6.79 per 1,000, then Sharon at 6.38 and Foxborough at 6.22, while Wellesley is lowest at 0.52. Foxborough recorded 10 fatal crashes, 15th among all 349 Massachusetts communities despite ranking 71st for crashes. Bicycles run below the state norm at 8.7 bicycle crashes per 1,000 against a statewide 10.7, with the exception of Brookline, where the figure is 57.7. The highest 2024 count for a single named road was Hartford Avenue in Bellingham at 142, measured across the twenty county communities the dataset carries road-level detail for. Civil cases are heard in Norfolk County Superior Court at 650 High Street in Dedham, 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 Court Catchments, and Why They Are the Right Way to Cut This County

Massachusetts assigns every town to a District Court division, and those assignments are published by the Trial Court. They are useful here for two separate reasons. They tell you where a case from a given crash will actually be heard, and because they were drawn along geography and travel patterns rather than along anything to do with safety, they happen to slice Norfolk County along exactly the axis its crash data cares about.

All twenty-eight towns are covered by seven 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
Wrentham	Foxborough, Franklin, Medway, Millis, Norfolk, Plainville, Walpole, Wrentham	6,693	28	4.18
Stoughton	Avon, Canton, Sharon, Stoughton	5,923	22	3.71
Dedham	Dedham, Dover, Medfield, Needham, Norwood, Wellesley, Westwood	8,227	24	2.92
Milford (Bellingham only)	Bellingham	1,717	4	2.33
Quincy	Braintree, Cohasset, Holbrook, Milton, Quincy, Randolph, Weymouth	18,103	34	1.88
Brookline	Brookline	1,231	2	1.62

Read the table from the bottom up and it is a map. The Quincy catchment, which is the dense coastal band immediately south of Boston, carries 43 percent of the county’s crashes and runs at 1.88 fatal per 1,000, well under the state average. The Wrentham catchment, the rural southwestern corner running along Route 1 and Interstate 495 toward the Rhode Island line, carries 16 percent of the crashes and runs at 4.18, well over it. The Stoughton catchment sits between them geographically and between them numerically. This is the same shape found in Worcester County, where the rural districts ran at up to fourteen times the ratio of the urban one, and the explanation is the same: low-speed intersection collisions near a hospital produce injuries, and high-speed collisions on two-lane roads a long way from a trauma center produce fatalities. The counts do not measure how carefully anyone drives.

One administrative detail that surprises people. Bellingham is a Norfolk County town, but its District Court is Milford District Court at 161 West St. in Milford, which is in Worcester County. Norfolk County Superior Court still hears the civil case; only the District Court division sits outside the county line.

The addresses, for the record: Norfolk County Superior Court, 650 High Street, Dedham. Quincy District Court, 1 Dennis Ryan Parkway, Quincy. Dedham District Court, 631 High St., Dedham. Stoughton District Court, 1288 Central St., Stoughton. Wrentham District Court, 60 East St., Wrentham. Brookline District Court, 360 Washington St., Brookline. Milford District Court, 161 West St., Milford.

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.

The Roads

The source data carries road-level detail only for communities clearing 800 crashes over the three years, which in Norfolk County means twenty of the twenty-eight. The eight smaller towns, Plainville, Holbrook, Medway, Medfield, Cohasset, Norfolk, Millis and Dover, 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
Hartford Avenue	Bellingham	142
Main Street	Weymouth	134
Washington Street	Stoughton	97
Worcester Street	Wellesley	89
South Main Street	Bellingham	73
Washington Street	Canton	70
Pulaski Boulevard	Bellingham	69
Central Street	Stoughton	68
Washington Street	Weymouth	68
Providence Highway	Dedham	66
Main Street	Walpole	66
Hancock Street, northbound	Quincy	65

Bellingham holds three of the top seven, which is remarkable for a town that ranks 64th in the state for crashes and does not appear in the fatal-ratio table above at all. Hartford Avenue, South Main Street and Pulaski Boulevard together account for 284 crashes in a single year in a town that recorded 1,717 across three. Whatever else is true of Bellingham, its crashes are concentrated on very few streets.

Quincy’s Hancock Street appears twice in the underlying data because the source records direction separately: 65 crashes northbound and 57 southbound, 122 for the street in one year. That is the highest single-street total in the county once direction is combined, and it is a straightforward main-street pattern rather than a highway one.

Three named corridors run through the county and are worth reading as corridors rather than as town entries.

Route 1. The old Providence Highway appears under at least four different names in the source data as it crosses town lines: Providence Highway in Dedham at 66 and Norwood at 48, Route 1 in Walpole at 47, General Edwards Highway in Sharon at 22 northbound and 13 southbound, and Washington Street in Wrentham at 12 northbound and 7 southbound. Adding those gives a rough sense of the corridor’s load, but it is an approximation rather than a corridor total, because the dataset names roads per community and a segment that changes name mid-town is not always caught.

Interstate 93. The stretch from Quincy up through Braintree, Milton, Randolph and Canton is the county’s share of the busiest highway in Massachusetts. The 2024 counts include 27 northbound in Braintree, 25 northbound and 19 southbound in Milton, 20 northbound and 14 southbound in Randolph, 17 southbound in Quincy, and 14 northbound and 11 southbound in Canton. The corridor as a whole is covered in the Interstate 93 crash data article.

Interstate 95 and Route 128. The county’s western arc runs through Dedham, Needham, Westwood, Canton, Sharon, Norwood and Foxborough, with 2024 counts including 20 southbound and 9 northbound in Dedham, 11 in Canton, 11 northbound and 10 southbound in Sharon, 10 in Foxborough, 8 in Needham and 8 in Westwood. The corridor piece is Route 128 crash data. Note that the source data labels segments of both I-93 and I-95 as “Yankee Division Highway” in different towns, so the route number in the record, rather than the name, is what identifies the road.

Route 24 also clips the county’s southeastern edge, appearing as AMVETS Memorial Highway with 35 northbound and 23 southbound in Randolph, 18 southbound in Avon and 14 southbound in Stoughton.

Bicycles

Norfolk County holds 10.3 percent of the state’s crashes and 8.3 percent of its bicycle crashes, which works out to 8.7 bicycle crashes per 1,000 crashes against a statewide 10.7. The county is below the state norm, and the reason is mostly that most of it is suburban and exurban road with limited cycling.

Then there is Brookline. Brookline recorded 71 bicycle crashes on 1,231 crashes overall, which is 57.7 per 1,000, more than five times the statewide figure and more than six times the rest of its own county. Quincy also recorded 71, tied with Brookline for the highest count in the county, but on 6,455 crashes, which is 11.0 per 1,000. The two towns are tied on count and are not remotely comparable on rate. Behind them: Needham 32, Weymouth 25, Wellesley 24, Milton 17, Braintree 13 and Norwood 12.

Brookline is what a genuinely high-cycling municipality looks like in this dataset, and it is the clearest single-town example in the county of why a raw count and a rate answer different questions. Riders’ rights and duties under Massachusetts law are covered in the Massachusetts bicycle laws article, and the commercial page for that town is bicycle accidents in Brookline.

Pedestrians

The county recorded 573 pedestrian crashes over the three years, 9.6 percent of the state total, which is 13.7 per 1,000 crashes against a statewide 14.8. Again slightly below the norm, and again with the variation inside the county doing all the work.

Quincy recorded 155 pedestrian crashes, tenth among all 349 Massachusetts communities and 24.0 per 1,000 of its own crashes, well above the state figure. Brookline recorded 74, which is 60.1 per 1,000 and the highest rate in the county by a wide margin. Weymouth recorded 50, Randolph and Stoughton 36 each, and Braintree 32. At the other end, Milton recorded 10 pedestrian crashes against 2,135 crashes overall, 4.7 per 1,000, roughly a third of the state norm.

The pattern is the ordinary one: pedestrian collisions concentrate where people walk, which in this county means Quincy Center, Brookline, and the older town centers along the coast. What a pedestrian is entitled to after being struck is set out in pedestrian accident rights in Massachusetts.

What This Data Does and Does Not Do for a Claim

It does not prove fault. Fault in a Massachusetts crash is decided on the evidence of the specific collision, and a road’s history does not establish that any particular driver was careless. Some of these numbers point at conditions rather than at drivers, and conditions are the harder and slower kind of case.

What the data does is tell you what to preserve and where to look. On a corridor with a documented crash history, the surrounding evidence, the signal timing, the sight lines, the prior complaints, the maintenance records, is worth requesting early, and it is exactly the material that gets overwritten if nobody asks.

It also tells you where the case will be handled, which affects timing more than most people expect. A case in the Quincy division, which covers a catchment carrying 43 percent of the county’s crashes, moves differently from one in Wrentham.

For the practice-area pages covering the three Norfolk County cities with their own commercial blocks, see car accidents in Quincy, car accidents in Weymouth, car accidents in Brookline, motorcycle accidents in Quincy, and truck accidents in Quincy. 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. Neighboring county pieces are Middlesex County, Bristol County, Worcester County and Plymouth County, the South Shore county directly to the south, where the same inversion appears with Brockton in the role Quincy plays here. The western Massachusetts comparison is the Hampden County crash data, the one county in the series whose largest city is not also its safest. 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 Norfolk County, Massachusetts each year?

A: Norfolk County recorded 41,894 crashes over the three years 2022 through 2024 in MassDOT’s crash records, which averages roughly 14,000 a year. Of the three-year total, 114 were fatal, 9,636 involved an injury, 363 involved a bicycle, and 573 involved a pedestrian. The county accounts for 10.3 percent of all crashes in Massachusetts.

Q: Which town in Norfolk County has the most crashes?

A: Quincy, at 6,455 crashes over the three years, which is ninth among all 349 Massachusetts communities and about 15 percent of the county’s total. Weymouth is next at 3,384, then Randolph at 2,606, Braintree at 2,536 and Stoughton at 2,350. Norfolk County is unusual among Massachusetts counties in not having a single dominant city; Quincy’s share of its county is well under half of what Worcester holds in Worcester County.

Q: Which Norfolk County town has the highest rate of fatal crashes?

A: Among communities recording at least 500 crashes over the three years, Plainville is highest at 6.79 fatal crashes per 1,000 crashes, then Sharon at 6.38, Foxborough at 6.22, Dedham at 5.66 and Wrentham at 4.69. By raw count, Foxborough is highest with 10 fatal crashes, which ranks 15th among all 349 Massachusetts communities even though the town ranks only 71st for crashes. Wellesley is the lowest of the larger towns at 0.52 per 1,000, and Cohasset and Millis recorded no fatal crash at all, on crash counts too small for the rate to carry meaning.

Q: Which Norfolk County roads have the most crashes?

A: In 2024, the most recent complete year in the dataset, Hartford Avenue in Bellingham recorded 142 crashes, the highest single-road count in the county’s road-level data. Main Street in Weymouth recorded 134, Washington Street in Stoughton 97, and Worcester Street in Wellesley 89. Hancock Street in Quincy is the highest single street once direction is combined, at 65 northbound and 57 southbound for 122. 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 twenty Norfolk County communities clearing its threshold of 800 crashes over the three years, so the eight smallest towns are not represented in the ranking.

Q: Why is the fatal-crash rate so different across one county?

A: The data shows the pattern but does not explain it, so what follows is inference rather than a finding. Grouped by District Court catchment, the ratio runs from 1.88 per 1,000 in the coastal Quincy district to 4.18 in the rural Wrentham district. The coastal band is dense, slow and close to hospitals, and produces a great many low-severity intersection collisions. The southwestern towns sit on two-lane roads carrying through traffic at higher speeds, farther from a trauma center. Speed and distance from emergency care are the usual explanations for that shape, and the same gradient appears in Worcester County and in the Merrimack Valley.

Q: Where would my Norfolk 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. Norfolk County Superior Court is at 650 High Street in Dedham and serves every city and town in the county. Smaller matters go to the geographic District Court division: Quincy for Braintree, Cohasset, Holbrook, Milton, Quincy, Randolph and Weymouth; Dedham for Dedham, Dover, Medfield, Needham, Norwood, Wellesley and Westwood; Stoughton for Avon, Canton, Sharon and Stoughton; Wrentham for Foxborough, Franklin, Medway, Millis, Norfolk, Plainville, Walpole and Wrentham; Brookline for Brookline; and Milford, which is in Worcester County, for Bellingham.

Q: Why does Brookline have so many bicycle crashes?

A: Brookline recorded 71 bicycle crashes on 1,231 crashes overall, which is 57.7 per 1,000 against a statewide 10.7. Quincy recorded the same count of 71, tied with Brookline for the highest in the county, but on 6,455 crashes, so its rate is 11.0. The rate difference is not a statement about how safe cycling is in either town; it is mostly a statement about how much cycling there is. Brookline is a dense, short-trip municipality with heavy bicycle use on streets shared with everything else. The county as a whole runs below the state norm at 8.7 bicycle crashes per 1,000.

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.