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

Across the twenty-seven cities and towns of Plymouth County, Massachusetts recorded 32,099 crashes from 2022 through 2024, including 117 fatal crashes, 8,574 crashes involving injury, 240 involving a bicycle, and 337 involving a pedestrian. That is 7.9 percent of every crash in the Commonwealth but 10.8 percent of every fatal one. Measured as fatal crashes per 1,000 crashes, the county runs at 3.64 against a statewide 2.68, which is 36 percent higher and ties Hampden County for the worst figure this series has measured. What makes Plymouth County different from Hampden is where the severity sits. Brockton is the seventh busiest crash location in Massachusetts and fifth in the state for fatal crashes outright, and yet Brockton’s fatal ratio is 2.71, below its own county and essentially level with the state. Remove Brockton and the other twenty-six communities run at 3.92. The dangerous driving in this county is happening south and east of the city, in the coastal towns and the cranberry country, on two-lane roads that carry far fewer crashes and kill far more often. 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 on the South Shore, 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-Seven Communities, and Where the Numbers Come From

Plymouth County covers twenty-seven cities and towns: Abington, Bridgewater, Brockton, Carver, Duxbury, East Bridgewater, Halifax, Hanover, Hanson, Hingham, Hull, Kingston, Lakeville, Marion, Marshfield, Mattapoisett, Middleborough, Norwell, Pembroke, Plymouth, Plympton, Rochester, Rockland, Scituate, Wareham, West Bridgewater, and Whitman.

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 Plymouth County towns carry very heavy seasonal volume on Route 3 and Route 6 toward the Cape. That is a genuine limitation of the data. It is also why the ratio comparisons in this piece, which hold crash 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
Brockton	7,378	20	2,604	7th of 349
Middleborough	2,846	7	608	33rd
Plymouth	2,735	8	786	36th
Wareham	1,716	9	476	65th
Bridgewater	1,575	5	372	75th
West Bridgewater	1,455	9	326	85th
Abington	1,414	7	419	86th
Hingham	1,235	7	228	98th
Hanover	1,198	2	280	102nd
East Bridgewater	1,148	0	230	104th

Brockton alone accounts for 23 percent of the county’s crashes, which puts Plymouth County between Worcester County, where Worcester holds 26 percent, and Norfolk County, where Quincy holds only 15 percent. Behind Brockton the distribution is unusually flat: nine more communities clear 1,000 crashes and none of them clears 3,000.

Full three-year figures for the towns above are published at Brockton, Middleborough, Plymouth, Wareham, Bridgewater, West Bridgewater, Abington, Hingham, Hanover, and East Bridgewater. Three more Plymouth County communities clear the data threshold for their own page: Marshfield, Pembroke and Rockland.

Answer Capsule

Plymouth County, Massachusetts recorded 32,099 crashes across its twenty-seven cities and towns from 2022 through 2024, per MassDOT crash records: 117 fatal, 8,574 involving injury, 240 involving a bicycle, and 337 involving a pedestrian. That is 7.9 percent of the statewide three-year total of 405,245 crashes but 10.8 percent of the state’s 1,087 fatal crashes. The county’s fatal-crash ratio is 3.64 per 1,000 crashes against a statewide 2.68, and its injury ratio is 267.1 per 1,000 against 228.9, while its bicycle and pedestrian shares run well below the state at 7.48 and 10.50 per 1,000 against 10.75 and 14.76. Brockton is the county’s busiest at 7,378 crashes, seventh among all 349 Massachusetts communities, and records 20 fatal crashes, fifth in the state, but its fatal ratio of 2.71 per 1,000 is below its own county’s and near the statewide figure. Remove Brockton and the remaining twenty-six communities run at 3.92 per 1,000. Grouped by the District Court that hears each town’s cases, the ratio runs 3.02 in the Brockton division, 3.39 in Hingham, 4.35 in Plymouth and 4.36 in Wareham, so the two southern coastal catchments are effectively tied at the top and both sit above every Norfolk County catchment. Two Plymouth County towns recorded zero fatal crashes across the three years despite substantial crash volume, East Bridgewater at 1,148 crashes and Whitman at 626; only eleven Massachusetts communities with at least 500 crashes managed that, and two of the eleven are adjacent towns in this county. The highest 2024 count for a single named road was Cranberry Highway in Wareham at 124, the eleventh highest single-road count anywhere in Massachusetts, followed by West Center Street in West Bridgewater at 111 and Main Street in Brockton at 96, measured across the thirteen county communities the dataset carries road-level detail for. Civil cases are heard in Plymouth County Superior Court on Obery Street in Plymouth, 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 City Is Not the Problem

Strip Brockton out and the county inverts. Brockton recorded 7,378 crashes and 20 fatal, a ratio of 2.71 per 1,000. The other twenty-six communities together recorded 24,721 crashes and 97 fatal, a ratio of 3.92. The busiest place in the county is, by this measure, safer than the county around it.

That is the same shape Norfolk County produced with Quincy and the opposite of what Hampden County produced with Springfield, and the reason is not mysterious. Dense street grids generate large numbers of low-speed collisions: a great many crashes, most of them survivable. Brockton’s own numbers show that clearly. It has the highest injury ratio in the county at 299.7 injury crashes per 1,000, well above the county’s 267.1 and the state’s 228.9, and it ranks eighth in Massachusetts for pedestrian crashes at 183. People are getting hurt in Brockton at a high rate. They are dying elsewhere.

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

Community	Crashes	Fatal	Fatal per 1,000
Carver	636	5	7.86
Lakeville	639	5	7.82
Duxbury	697	5	7.17
West Bridgewater	1,455	9	6.19
Hingham	1,235	7	5.67
Marshfield	913	5	5.48
Wareham	1,716	9	5.24
Kingston	778	4	5.14
Abington	1,414	7	4.95
Bridgewater	1,575	5	3.17
Plymouth	2,735	8	2.93
Brockton	7,378	20	2.71
Middleborough	2,846	7	2.46
Hanover	1,198	2	1.67
Rockland	809	1	1.24
East Bridgewater	1,148	0	0.00
Whitman	626	0	0.00

The top of that table needs a warning attached to it. Carver’s 7.86 is five fatal crashes out of 636, and Lakeville’s 7.82 is five out of 639. One crash either way moves those figures substantially, and no single town in this table should be described as the most dangerous in the county on the strength of five events. What the table supports is the pattern, not the ranking: eight of the nine highest ratios belong to towns with fewer than 1,800 crashes each, and the four largest crash locations in the county all sit in the bottom half.

The Two Towns With No Fatal Crashes

East Bridgewater recorded 1,148 crashes over three years and not one fatal. Whitman recorded 626 and not one fatal. Across all 349 Massachusetts communities, only eleven recorded at least 500 crashes and zero fatal crashes over the same period, and two of those eleven are adjacent towns in this county, sitting in the same District Court catchment as Brockton.

This is worth stating carefully. Zero is a real number and three years is a real window, but zero is also the outcome a town of that size would sometimes produce by chance even with entirely ordinary roads. What can be said without straining is that both towns generated a substantial amount of crash activity, and that none of it proved fatal, which is not true of any comparably sized town in the southern half of the county.

Grouped by the Court That Would Hear the Case

The county’s twenty-seven communities are divided among four District Courts, and unlike Norfolk County the division is clean: every town belongs to exactly one court, no court reaches across the county line, and the four catchments sum exactly to the county totals. Because those boundaries are administrative rather than geographic conveniences, they also happen to separate the county along the axis the data cares about.

District Court	Towns	Crashes	Fatal	Fatal per 1,000	Injury per 1,000
Wareham	7	6,884	30	4.36	235.9
Plymouth	8	6,896	30	4.35	259.3
Hingham	6	4,723	16	3.39	230.2
Brockton	6	13,596	41	3.02	299.7

Wareham and Plymouth are tied for all practical purposes, at 4.36 and 4.35, on nearly identical crash volumes, and both sit more than 60 percent above the state average. These are the two southern catchments: the Wareham division covers Carver, Lakeville, Marion, Mattapoisett, Middleborough, Rochester and Wareham, and the Plymouth division covers Duxbury, Halifax, Hanson, Kingston, Marshfield, Pembroke, Plymouth and Plympton. Between them they cover the cranberry country and the outer coast, and between them they carry 60 of the county’s 117 fatal crashes on 43 percent of its crashes.

The Brockton division, which covers Abington, Bridgewater, Brockton, East Bridgewater, West Bridgewater and Whitman, carries 42 percent of the county’s crashes and the lowest fatal ratio in it, along with by far the highest injury ratio. The Hingham division, covering Hanover, Hingham, Hull, Norwell, Rockland and Scituate, is the quietest block on both measures.

The Roads

The source data carries road-level detail only for the thirteen Plymouth County communities that clear its threshold of 800 crashes over the three years, so the fourteen smallest towns do not appear here at all. Within those thirteen, ranked by 2024 crashes on a single named road:

Road	Community	2024 crashes
Cranberry Highway	Wareham	124
West Center Street	West Bridgewater	111
Main Street	Brockton	96
Belmont Street	Brockton	85
Pleasant Street	Brockton	83
Washington Street	Hanover	79
North Montello Street	Brockton	68
North Main Street	Brockton	64
Oak Street	Brockton	63
State Road	Plymouth	58

Two of those deserve attention beyond their position on the list. Cranberry Highway in Wareham, at 124 crashes in a single year, is the eleventh highest count for any named road anywhere in Massachusetts, which is remarkable for a town that ranks 65th in the state for total crashes. It is a commercial strip carrying Cape-bound traffic, and the Wareham District Court is itself located on it. West Center Street in West Bridgewater, at 111, ranks eighteenth in the state and accounts for close to a quarter of everything that happens on that town’s roads.

The rest of the list is Brockton, which is what you would expect: six of the top ten are city streets in the county’s one city, and none of them approaches the top two.

Two further notes on reading this table. These are counts for named roads within each community, not totals for a corridor running across town lines, so a route that passes through four towns appears four times or not at all depending on how each town’s records name it. And a high count is a measure of exposure as much as of danger. A road that carries enormous volume will produce crashes even if every driver on it behaves well.

What This Means If You Were in a Crash Here

Crash statistics do not decide fault. That is settled on the evidence of the specific collision, under the rules described in how fault is determined in a Massachusetts car accident and, where more than one driver contributed, Massachusetts comparative negligence. What the data does is tell you where to look early. On a corridor with a documented crash history, the sight lines, the signal timing, the maintenance records and the prior complaints to the municipality are all worth requesting before they age out.

It also tells you which courthouse. 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. Plymouth County Superior Court sits on Obery Street in Plymouth and serves every city and town in the county, with criminal sessions held in Brockton. Smaller matters go to the geographic District Court division listed above.

Whatever the venue, the first layer of a Massachusetts crash claim runs through no-fault benefits rather than through the other driver, which is set out in how personal injury protection works, and the coverage that has to be in place on every registered vehicle is described in the Massachusetts minimum car insurance requirements. For the two largest communities in the county, the practice pages are at Brockton car accidents and Plymouth car accidents. The neighbouring counties in this series are covered at Norfolk County, Bristol County and Worcester County. For the contrast at the other end of the state’s density scale, where a four-town county produces double the statewide pedestrian rate, see the Suffolk County crash data.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Is Plymouth County more dangerous than the rest of Massachusetts?

A: On the severity measures in this dataset, yes. The county records 3.64 fatal crashes per 1,000 crashes against a statewide 2.68, and 267.1 injury crashes per 1,000 against 228.9. It records notably fewer bicycle and pedestrian crashes per 1,000 than the state, at 7.48 and 10.50 against 10.75 and 14.76, which is the signature of a suburban and rural county rather than an urban one. What the data cannot tell you is why, because it carries no measure of traffic volume, road type or travel speed, so the honest description is that crashes here are more likely to be severe, not that drivers here are worse.

Q: Which Plymouth County town has the most car accidents?

A: Brockton, by a wide margin: 7,378 crashes from 2022 through 2024, which is 23 percent of the county total and the seventh highest count among all 349 Massachusetts communities. Middleborough is second at 2,846 and Plymouth third at 2,735.

Q: If Brockton has the most crashes, why is it not the most dangerous?

A: Because volume and severity are different measures. Brockton records 20 fatal crashes, fifth most in Massachusetts in absolute terms, but spread across 7,378 crashes that works out to 2.71 per 1,000, which is below the county’s 3.64 and close to the statewide 2.68. Its injury ratio, by contrast, is the highest in the county at 299.7 per 1,000, and it ranks eighth in the state for pedestrian crashes. The pattern is a large number of collisions at city speeds: more people hurt, proportionally fewer killed.

Q: Which Plymouth County roads have the most crashes?

A: In 2024, the most recent complete year in the dataset, Cranberry Highway in Wareham recorded 124 crashes, the highest single-road count in the county and the eleventh highest anywhere in Massachusetts. West Center Street in West Bridgewater recorded 111, ranking eighteenth in the state. Main Street in Brockton recorded 96, Belmont Street in Brockton 85, and Pleasant Street in Brockton 83. These are counts for named roads within each community rather than corridor totals across town lines, and the source data carries road detail only for the thirteen Plymouth County communities clearing its threshold of 800 crashes over three years, so the fourteen smallest towns are not represented in the ranking.

Q: Are the small towns in the south of the county really the dangerous ones?

A: The pooled figures support that and the individual town figures do not. Grouped by District Court catchment, the Wareham division runs at 4.36 fatal crashes per 1,000 and the Plymouth division at 4.35, both far above the Brockton division’s 3.02, and those groupings have denominators of roughly 6,900 crashes each, which is large enough to take seriously. Take any single town out of them and the numbers become fragile: Carver’s leading 7.86 rests on five fatal crashes out of 636, and one event either way would move it several places. The band is a finding. Any one town’s rank inside it is not.

Q: Did any Plymouth County town record no fatal crashes at all?

A: Two did. East Bridgewater recorded 1,148 crashes and Whitman 626 across the three years with no fatal crash in either. Across the whole state, only eleven communities with at least 500 crashes recorded zero fatal crashes over that window, and two of the eleven are these adjacent Plymouth County towns.

Q: Where would my Plymouth 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, raised to $50,000 by a 2019 standing order of the Supreme Judicial Court for actions commenced on or after January 1, 2020. Plymouth County Superior Court is on Obery Street in Plymouth and serves the whole county, with criminal sessions in Brockton. Below that threshold, cases go to the geographic District Court: Brockton for Abington, Bridgewater, Brockton, East Bridgewater, West Bridgewater and Whitman; Plymouth for Duxbury, Halifax, Hanson, Kingston, Marshfield, Pembroke, Plymouth and Plympton; Hingham for Hanover, Hingham, Hull, Norwell, Rockland and Scituate; and Wareham for Carver, Lakeville, Marion, Mattapoisett, Middleborough, Rochester and Wareham.

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: 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.