Which Massachusetts Towns Have the Most Pleasant Street Crashes?

Fall River. MassDOT’s 2024 crash records show 117 crashes on Pleasant Street in Fall River, which is the largest figure recorded for any single Pleasant Street segment anywhere in Massachusetts, and it is the highest-crash road within a city that ranks fifth of all 349 Massachusetts communities for total crashes. Brockton is second at 83, Amherst third at 61 across three separately recorded segments, Weymouth fourth at 43 and Bridgewater fifth at 41. Fourteen Massachusetts cities and towns carry a Pleasant Street segment among their eight highest-crash roads, and together those fourteen town lists account for 444 crashes in that single year. On MassDOT’s statewide top-road list, where each road name appears once rather than town by town, PLEASANT ST sits third at 633 crashes, behind MAIN ST at 2,672 and WASHINGTON ST at 1,118 and ahead of Interstate 93 northbound at 444 and BROADWAY at 402. The more interesting number is not the total. Across three years those fourteen communities recorded 9.06 per cent of every crash in Massachusetts, 11.51 per cent of every crash involving a pedestrian, and only 6.99 per cent of every fatal crash. Every figure here comes from MassDOT crash records and can be checked town by town in the Massachusetts crash report. To talk through a crash on any of these streets, call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS. The line is answered 24 hours a day. The first telephone consultation is offered without charge.

The Fourteen Pleasant Street Towns

These are 2024 counts for road segments recorded under the name Pleasant Street. They are per-town figures rather than corridor totals, because these are fourteen different roads that happen to share a name, not one road running through fourteen towns.

Town	County	Pleasant Street crashes, 2024	Segments recorded	Rank in that town
Fall River	Bristol	117	1	highest-crash road in the city
Brockton	Plymouth	83	1	third
Amherst	Hampshire	61	3	second, on the North Pleasant Street segment
Weymouth	Norfolk	43	1	fourth
Bridgewater	Plymouth	41	1	highest-crash road in the town
Dracut	Middlesex	29	1	third
Stoughton	Norfolk	16	1	fifth
Northampton	Hampshire	12	1	seventh
Tewksbury	Middlesex	10	1	eighth
Attleboro	Bristol	9	1	fourth
Easthampton	Hampshire	8	1	seventh
Arlington	Middlesex	6	1	fourth
Watertown	Middlesex	5	1	sixth
Grafton	Worcester	4	1	eighth

Two of the fourteen have Pleasant Street as the single highest-crash road in the municipality, Fall River and Bridgewater. In Amherst it is second, in Brockton and Dracut third.

Fall River deserves a word on its own. That 117 is a single recorded segment, not a set of pieces added together, which makes it the largest continuous Pleasant Street entry in the state and larger than the Brockton and Amherst figures that follow it. It sits in a city with 9,045 crashes across 2022 to 2024, fifth in Massachusetts behind only the largest cities, and it beats every other named road in that city.

Amherst is the opposite shape. Its 61 is three separate entries, North Pleasant Street at 26, East Pleasant Street at 18 and South Pleasant Street at 17, which together make Pleasant Street a larger presence in that town than the raw ranking of any one of them suggests. It is also the reason two figures appear in this article rather than one. Counting only entries recorded as plain Pleasant Street, the count is 383 across thirteen towns. Counting the Amherst directional variants as well, it is 444 across fourteen. Both are sums of town lists, and neither is the number used to rank the street name.

Answer Capsule

Fall River has the most Pleasant Street crashes of any Massachusetts community: 117 in 2024, on a single recorded segment, per MassDOT crash records, and Pleasant Street is the highest-crash road in that city. Brockton follows at 83, Amherst at 61 across three separately recorded segments, Weymouth at 43, Bridgewater at 41, Dracut at 29, Stoughton at 16, Northampton at 12, Tewksbury at 10, Attleboro at 9, Easthampton at 8, Arlington at 6, Watertown at 5 and Grafton at 4, for a fourteen-town total of 444 in that single year, or 383 across thirteen towns if Amherst’s North, East and South Pleasant Street segments are excluded. On MassDOT’s statewide top-road list, where each road name appears once rather than town by town, PLEASANT ST is recorded at 633 crashes, third among all entries behind MAIN ST at 2,672 and WASHINGTON ST at 1,118, and ahead of Interstate 93 northbound at 444 and BROADWAY at 402. That 633 is 0.47 per cent of the 135,441 crashes recorded statewide in 2024. Across 2022 to 2024 the fourteen Pleasant Street communities recorded 36,696 crashes, 76 of them fatal, 9,508 involving injury, 356 involving a bicycle and 688 involving a pedestrian. That is 9.06 per cent of the statewide 405,239 crashes, 11.51 per cent of the statewide 5,980 pedestrian crashes, 8.17 per cent of the statewide 4,356 bicycle crashes, and 6.99 per cent of the statewide 1,087 fatal crashes. Expressed per 1,000 crashes, the group runs at 18.75 pedestrian against a statewide 14.76, and 2.07 fatal against a statewide 2.68. Within the group the spread tracks the character of the street rather than its name: Watertown is highest on pedestrian involvement at 38.46 per 1,000 and Arlington records 42.38 bicycle crashes per 1,000, nearly four times the statewide rate, while Dracut, where Pleasant Street runs through lower-density land, is highest on fatal crashes at 3.75 per 1,000 and near the bottom on pedestrian involvement at 6.74. MassDOT records a route number for only one of the fourteen, Route 123 in Attleboro. Crash counts do not establish fault in any individual case. This is general information, not legal advice. Call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS.

The Pattern That Has Now Held Three Times

This site has published the same analysis for the three largest street names in the Massachusetts crash data, and the result has come out the same way each time.

Street name	Pedestrian crashes per 1,000	Fatal crashes per 1,000
Broadway, twelve communities	20.97	1.56
Pleasant Street, fourteen communities	18.75	2.07
Main Street, nineteen communities	17.01	2.26
Massachusetts as a whole	14.76	2.68

Every one of the three groups sits above the state on pedestrian involvement and below it on fatal crashes, and the two rates move in opposite directions in each case. That is the signature of dense arterials carrying slow, conflict-heavy traffic through places where people walk. It is not the signature of dangerous roads, which would push both numbers the same way.

Pleasant Street sits between the other two on both measures, which is what a mixed group should look like. Broadway’s twelve towns are mostly dense inner-suburban cities. Main Street’s nineteen include a lot of small-town centres. Pleasant Street’s fourteen contain both, from Fall River and Brockton at one end to Grafton and Bridgewater at the other, and the group average lands in between.

Where the Pedestrians Are

The same fourteen, ranked by pedestrian crashes per 1,000 crashes over 2022 to 2024, with the bicycle and fatal ratios beside them.

Town	Crashes, 3 years	Pedestrian per 1,000	Bicycle per 1,000	Fatal per 1,000
Watertown	988	38.46	32.39	2.02
Amherst	1,072	26.12	13.99	2.80
Arlington	1,109	25.25	42.38	1.80
Brockton	7,378	24.80	8.40	2.71
Fall River	9,045	23.55	7.19	1.22
Northampton	1,602	20.60	18.73	2.50
Stoughton	2,350	15.32	5.96	3.40
Easthampton	870	14.94	5.75	3.45
Weymouth	3,384	14.78	7.39	1.48
Attleboro	3,234	8.66	7.42	1.24
Tewksbury	1,806	7.20	8.86	1.66
Bridgewater	1,575	6.98	5.08	3.17
Dracut	1,335	6.74	6.74	3.75
Grafton	948	5.27	4.22	1.05
Massachusetts	405,239	14.76	10.75	2.68

Nine of the fourteen sit above the statewide pedestrian rate and five sit below it, and the split is geographic rather than random. The five below, Attleboro, Tewksbury, Bridgewater, Dracut and Grafton, are the communities where Pleasant Street is a connector between built-up areas rather than a street through one. Four of those five are also in the top half of the group on fatal crashes per 1,000, which is the familiar trade: faster roads with fewer people on foot produce fewer pedestrian crashes and worse outcomes when a crash happens.

Watertown is the standout at the top. It records 38.46 pedestrian crashes per 1,000, which is 2.6 times the statewide rate, on the smallest Pleasant Street entry of any town on the list at 5 crashes in 2024. The town-level pedestrian exposure and the size of that particular street’s crash count are two different things, and this is the clearest illustration on the list of why they should not be read as one.

The Bicycle Numbers Belong to Two Towns

Arlington records 42.38 bicycle crashes per 1,000 crashes, nearly four times the statewide 10.75, and Watertown records 32.39. Northampton is third at 18.73 and Amherst fourth at 13.99. The other ten are all at or below the state rate, and the group as a whole comes in at 9.70, slightly under it.

So the bicycle picture here is not a Pleasant Street effect. It is four specific communities with substantial cycling populations, two of them adjacent inner-suburban towns on the Charles and two of them Pioneer Valley college towns. The rest of the group looks ordinary.

Where a bicycle claim does turn on a rule of the road rather than on a count, the relevant one is M.G.L. c. 90, sec. 14, which provides that “In passing a vulnerable user, the operator of a motor vehicle shall pass at a safe distance of not less than 4 feet and at a reasonable and proper speed.”

Three of the Fourteen Are in One County

Amherst, Northampton and Easthampton are three contiguous Hampshire County communities, and all three carry a Pleasant Street among their highest-crash roads. That is three of the fourteen in one small county in the Pioneer Valley, against a single town from Worcester County and none from Suffolk or Essex.

Taken as a group those three recorded 3,544 crashes across 2022 to 2024, with 74 pedestrian crashes for 20.88 per 1,000 and 50 bicycle crashes for 14.11 per 1,000, both above the statewide rates, and 10 fatal crashes. It is a small enough group that the ratios should be read as descriptive rather than as a finding, but the shape is consistent with what these places are: three walkable centres with large student and cycling populations.

For readers looking at the region rather than the street, the western Massachusetts crash data article covers the Pioneer Valley counties as a whole.

The Law That Fits a Street Like This

A Pleasant Street collision is an ordinary Massachusetts motor vehicle claim, and four provisions do most of the work.

Reporting. M.G.L. c. 90, sec. 26 requires every person operating a motor vehicle involved in an accident “in which any person is killed or injured or in which there is damage in excess of one thousand dollars to any one vehicle or other property” to report in writing to the registrar within five days and to send a copy to the police department having jurisdiction on the way where the accident occurred.

Crosswalks. Because these are pedestrian-heavy streets, M.G.L. c. 89, sec. 11 matters. Where traffic control signals are not in place or not in operation, a driver “shall yield the right of way, slowing down or stopping if need be so to yield, to a pedestrian crossing the roadway within a crosswalk” marked to the department’s standards, on the driver’s half of the way or approaching within 10 feet of it. No driver “shall pass any other vehicle which has stopped at a marked crosswalk to permit a pedestrian to cross.” A violation carries a fine of not more than $200, and the section further provides that whenever a pedestrian is injured by a motor vehicle in a marked crosswalk, the state police or the municipal department with jurisdiction of the street “shall conduct an investigation into the cause of the injury and any violation of this section or other law or ordinance and shall issue the appropriate civil or criminal citation or file an application for the appropriate criminal complaint, if any.”

Shared fault. M.G.L. c. 231, sec. 85 provides that contributory negligence does not bar recovery where the injured person’s negligence “was not greater than the total amount of negligence attributable to the person or persons against whom recovery is sought,” with damages reduced in proportion. The same section abolishes the defence of assumption of risk and provides that “the plaintiff shall be presumed to have been in the exercise of due care.” Our explainer on comparative negligence and partial fault goes into how that percentage is argued.

The threshold. In a motor vehicle case, M.G.L. c. 231, sec. 6D permits damages for pain and suffering only where reasonable and necessary medical expenses exceed two thousand dollars, unless the injury caused death, consists in whole or in part of loss of a body member or of permanent and serious disfigurement, results in the loss of sight or hearing the section describes, or consists of a fracture. The serious injury threshold article covers how that is established.

What These Numbers Do Not Show

Stating the limits is part of publishing the numbers.

The crash records carry no traffic volume and no street mileage. Without a denominator, a busy road cannot be distinguished from a dangerous one, and nothing here supports calling any street the most dangerous in Massachusetts.

The road counts are for 2024 only. The town totals, and every pedestrian, bicycle and fatal figure in this article, cover 2022 through 2024. Those two are on different clocks and should not be mixed.

MassDOT itemises highest-crash roads for 144 of the 349 Massachusetts communities, and caps each of those lists at eight entries. That is why the fourteen town figures sum to 444 while the statewide PLEASANT ST entry is 633. The missing 189 crashes sit in communities where Pleasant Street ranked ninth or lower in its own town, or where no road detail is published at all.

Pedestrian, bicycle and fatal counts are published at town level rather than per road, so the ratios in this article describe the fourteen communities, not the fourteen streets. A high pedestrian rate in Watertown is a fact about Watertown.

And a crash count does not decide a case. Massachusetts decides fault on the evidence of the individual collision, and the record of a road matters only where the claim is about the road itself.

Talking to a Lawyer

If you were hurt on any of these streets, the useful facts are the ones specific to your collision: the police report, the scene photographs, any camera that covers the location, and the medical records that establish the injury. Records about the road, including signal timing, complaint history and maintenance, are far easier to obtain in the months after a crash than in the years after one.

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. This article is general information about Massachusetts crash data and Massachusetts law and not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney client relationship.

Common Questions

Q: Which Massachusetts town has the most Pleasant Street crashes?

A: Fall River, at 117 in 2024. That is the largest figure recorded for a single Pleasant Street segment anywhere in the state, and Pleasant Street is also the highest-crash road within Fall River itself, ahead of every other named road in the city. Brockton is second at 83, Amherst third at 61 across three separately recorded segments, Weymouth fourth at 43 and Bridgewater fifth at 41.

Q: How many Massachusetts towns have a Pleasant Street among their worst roads?

A: Fourteen, in the 2024 MassDOT records: Fall River, Brockton, Amherst, Weymouth, Bridgewater, Dracut, Stoughton, Northampton, Tewksbury, Attleboro, Easthampton, Arlington, Watertown and Grafton. Their segments sum to 444 crashes in that year. Counting only entries recorded as plain Pleasant Street, which excludes Amherst’s North, East and South Pleasant Street segments, the figure is 383 across thirteen towns. On MassDOT’s statewide top-road list, where each name is recorded once, PLEASANT ST appears at 633, third behind MAIN ST at 2,672 and WASHINGTON ST at 1,118.

Q: Is Pleasant Street dangerous?

A: The data cannot answer that and it is worth being clear about why. MassDOT crash records carry no traffic volume and no street mileage, so there is nothing to divide the crash counts by. A road with more crashes may simply be a road more people use. What the figures do show is a consistent pattern in the kind of crash: the fourteen Pleasant Street communities run about 27 per cent above the statewide pedestrian rate and about 23 per cent below the statewide fatal rate.

Q: Why do Pleasant Street towns have more pedestrian crashes than the state average?

A: Because most of them are walkable places. Across 2022 to 2024 the fourteen recorded 688 pedestrian crashes, 11.51 per cent of the statewide 5,980, on 9.06 per cent of the state’s crashes. Watertown is highest at 38.46 pedestrian crashes per 1,000, followed by Amherst at 26.12, Arlington at 25.25, Brockton at 24.80 and Fall River at 23.55, against a statewide 14.76. The towns at the other end, Grafton at 5.27, Dracut at 6.74 and Bridgewater at 6.98, are the ones where Pleasant Street runs through low-density land rather than a town centre.

Q: Which Pleasant Street town has the highest fatal crash rate?

A: Dracut, at 3.75 fatal crashes per 1,000 crashes over the three years, followed by Easthampton at 3.45, Stoughton at 3.40 and Bridgewater at 3.17. Those ratios rest on small numbers of fatal crashes, 5 in Dracut and 3 in Easthampton, so they should be read with the size of the denominator in mind. Grafton is lowest at 1.05, on a single fatal crash across 948.

Q: Is Pleasant Street the same road in every town?

A: No. These are fourteen separate streets that happen to share a name, not one road running through fourteen communities. MassDOT records a route number for only one of them, Route 123 in Attleboro. The Arlington entry carries a directional marker and no route number, and the other twelve carry neither. That matters practically, because a police report or a MassDOT record for a Pleasant Street location may be indexed under a designation the person requesting it was never told about.

Q: Why do the town figures add up to 444 when the statewide figure is 633?

A: Because of how the source is published. MassDOT itemises highest-crash roads for 144 of the 349 Massachusetts communities, and each of those town lists is capped at eight entries. A Pleasant Street that ranks ninth in its own town is counted in the statewide total and is invisible in the town lists. The 189 crash difference sits in those towns. The statewide list, where each road name appears once, is the correct place to rank a street name; a sum of town lists is only ever a sum of town lists and is described that way here.

Q: Does a high crash count on Pleasant Street help my case?

A: Not by itself. A crash total for a road or a town does not establish that any particular driver was negligent, and Massachusetts decides fault on the evidence of the individual collision. Where a road’s history can matter is in a claim about the road itself, involving signal timing, sight lines, markings, lighting or maintenance, and those records are far easier to obtain in the months after a crash than in the years after one.

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. Whether any of it bears on your situation depends on facts that are not in this article, including where the crash happened, who was involved and what the evidence shows. For advice about your own case, speak with a lawyer.