How Dangerous Is Route 1 in Massachusetts? Crash Data From Attleboro to Salisbury

US Route 1 runs the whole length of eastern Massachusetts, entering from Rhode Island at Attleboro and leaving for New Hampshire at Salisbury, and the twenty-eight cities and towns it passes through recorded 63,396 crashes from 2022 through 2024, including 187 fatal crashes, 15,891 crashes involving injury, 669 involving a bicycle and 1,248 involving a pedestrian. That is 15.64 per cent of every crash in the Commonwealth from 8.02 per cent of its communities. Those towns show a fatal rate of 2.95 crashes per 1,000 against a statewide 2.68, which reads as a more lethal corridor, and that reading is wrong. Boston is on the list, Boston is the largest crash community in Massachusetts, and Boston accounts for 27.46 per cent of the corridor’s crashes and 34.76 per cent of its deaths. Take Boston out and the remaining twenty-seven towns run 2.65 fatal crashes per 1,000, slightly below the state as a whole. What does not wash out is pedestrian exposure: 19.69 pedestrian crashes per 1,000 with Boston included and 16.46 without, against a statewide 14.76, with Chelsea at 44.52 and Malden at 37.26. The corridor’s real story is not that Route 1 kills more people. It is that the road changes character four times across its length, and the segment that looks most dangerous is the safest one in the data. Every figure below comes from MassDOT crash records for 2022 through 2024 and can be checked town by town in the Massachusetts crash report. 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.

One Number, Three Roads

Route 1 is not a road. It is a number laid over three of them, and any honest reading of the crash data has to start there.

South of Boston, US 1 is a surface arterial. It comes out of Rhode Island into Attleboro, parallels Interstate 95 north through North Attleborough, Plainville, Wrentham, Foxborough, Walpole, Sharon, Norwood and Westwood, and for most of that distance it is the old Norfolk and Bristol Turnpike with traffic lights, driveways and left turns across oncoming lanes.

Through greater Boston, US 1 owns no pavement at all. It runs a wrong-way concurrency with I-95 from Westwood as far as the southern end of I-93, then is signed along I-93 from Canton through Milton, Quincy, Braintree and into downtown Boston, with Route 3 joining the same road at Braintree. Every crash counted for that stretch happened on an interstate that already has its own article on this site.

North of Boston, US 1 reappears as its own road at the Tobin Bridge and runs as the Northeast Expressway and then a limited-access expressway through Chelsea, Revere, Malden, Saugus, Lynnfield and Peabody, which is the stretch with the neon and the roadside restaurants. Beyond Peabody it drops back to a surface road, the old Newburyport Turnpike, through Danvers, Topsfield, Ipswich, Rowley, Newbury, Newburyport and Salisbury to the state line.

Those four descriptions are also four different crash profiles, and the rest of this page is mostly about how different they are.

Where the Numbers Come From, and What They Cannot Do

The counts come from MassDOT’s open crash data, the record assembled from Massachusetts crash reports, covering calendar years 2022, 2023 and 2024. Fatal-crash counts are MassDOT’s rather than any federal dataset. Road-level counts further down are for 2024 alone, the most recent complete year, because road naming in the source shifts enough year over year that stacking three years of it produces noise rather than signal. For scale, those same three years produced 405,245 crashes statewide, 1,087 fatal, 92,759 involving injury, 4,356 involving a bicycle and 5,980 involving a pedestrian.

Three limitations belong at the top rather than in a footnote.

The first is that MassDOT crash records contain no traffic volume. They cannot separate a road that is more dangerous from a road that simply carries more vehicles, and they cannot produce a rate per mile driven. Everything here is crash-to-crash: how these communities’ crashes compare with other communities’ crashes. There is also no cause field, so nothing on this page identifies speed, road design, weather, alcohol or anything else as the reason for any pattern.

The second is that this corridor contains Boston, and Boston distorts every total it appears in. Boston recorded 17,407 crashes over the three years, the highest count of any community in the Commonwealth, which is 27.46 per cent of this corridor’s crashes, 34.76 per cent of its fatal crashes, 39.34 per cent of its pedestrian crashes and 40.81 per cent of its bicycle crashes. Any corridor-wide figure that includes it is largely a statement about Boston. That is why the corridor total and the corridor-minus-Boston total are both published below, side by side, rather than only the one that makes a better headline.

The third is about road names. The source records a road as the officer filling in the report wrote it, which means one stretch of highway appears under several labels, sometimes labels that do not obviously belong to it. The rule applied throughout this page is narrow and stated so it can be checked: a road is described as Route 1 only where the dataset itself labels a road in that same town with “Rte 1” or “US1”. Eleven of the twenty-eight towns meet that test. Everywhere else, a town’s highest-crash roads are reported as exactly that, with no claim about which route they carry.

Sharon is the clearest illustration of why that rule is needed. Its 2024 list contains three segments labelled US 1, and all three of them are named General Edwards Highway, which is the name of a bridge in Lynn roughly thirty miles away. The route designation is correct, because Route 1 genuinely does run through Sharon between Walpole and Norwood. The street name attached to it in those rows is not. A crash record is a document typed by a person at a scene, and this page treats it that way.

Every Community on the Route

Ordered south to north, the way the road runs. Ranks are among all 349 Massachusetts communities in the dataset.

Community	County	Segment	Crashes	Fatal	Injury	Bicycle	Pedestrian	Rank	Fatal per 1,000
Attleboro	Bristol	South surface	3,234	4	815	24	28	29th	1.24
North Attleborough	Bristol	South surface	1,555	5	378	9	11	77th	3.22
Plainville	Norfolk	South surface	736	5	172	7	3	152nd	6.79
Wrentham	Norfolk	South surface	1,067	5	264	4	4	111th	4.69
Foxborough	Norfolk	South surface	1,609	10	379	2	11	71st	6.22
Walpole	Norfolk	South surface	1,220	2	242	7	19	100th	1.64
Sharon	Norfolk	South surface	1,254	8	337	3	9	96th	6.38
Norwood	Norfolk	South surface	1,150	4	308	12	21	103rd	3.48
Westwood	Norfolk	South surface	1,475	2	250	8	13	84th	1.36
Dedham	Norfolk	Borrowed interstate	1,413	8	366	11	22	87th	5.66
Canton	Norfolk	Borrowed interstate	1,374	3	304	5	6	89th	2.18
Milton	Norfolk	Borrowed interstate	2,135	8	715	17	10	48th	3.75
Quincy	Norfolk	Borrowed interstate	6,455	7	1,308	71	155	9th	1.08
Braintree	Norfolk	Borrowed interstate	2,536	9	759	13	32	38th	3.55
Boston	Suffolk	Borrowed interstate	17,407	65	4,533	273	491	1st	3.73
Chelsea	Suffolk	North expressway	2,920	7	724	39	130	32nd	2.40
Revere	Suffolk	North expressway	2,298	6	712	27	75	40th	2.61
Malden	Middlesex	North expressway	2,791	3	709	51	104	35th	1.07
Saugus	Essex	North expressway	2,063	2	638	15	27	50th	0.97
Lynnfield	Essex	North expressway	801	3	183	3	3	143rd	3.75
Peabody	Essex	North expressway	3,746	5	847	30	41	20th	1.33
Danvers	Essex	North shore surface	1,331	2	387	9	16	92nd	1.50
Topsfield	Essex	North shore surface	294	4	88	1	0	230th	13.61
Ipswich	Essex	North shore surface	525	2	90	8	2	187th	3.81
Rowley	Essex	North shore surface	237	0	65	2	1	242nd	0.00
Newbury	Essex	North shore surface	266	4	65	0	3	234th	15.04
Newburyport	Essex	North shore surface	765	3	118	10	9	149th	3.92
Salisbury	Essex	North shore surface	739	1	135	8	2	151st	1.35
All 28			63,396	187	15,891	669	1,248		2.95
27 without Boston			45,989	122	11,358	396	757		2.65
Massachusetts			405,245	1,087	92,759	4,356	5,980		2.68

Answer Capsule

The 28 Massachusetts communities US Route 1 passes through recorded 63,396 crashes from 2022 through 2024, with 187 fatal, 15,891 involving injury, 669 involving a bicycle and 1,248 involving a pedestrian, per MassDOT crash records. That is 15.64 per cent of all Massachusetts crashes and 17.20 per cent of all fatal ones, from 8.02 per cent of the state’s communities. The corridor’s fatal rate of 2.95 per 1,000 is above the statewide 2.68, but the entire difference is Boston: without it the other 27 towns run 2.65, slightly below the state. The signal that survives is pedestrian exposure, 19.69 pedestrian crashes per 1,000 with Boston and 16.46 without, against a statewide 14.76, led by Chelsea at 44.52 and Malden at 37.26. Within the corridor the fatal rate inverts against intuition: the six-town expressway strip from Chelsea to Peabody runs 1.78 fatal crashes per 1,000, the lowest of the four segments, while the seven quiet surface towns from Danvers to Salisbury run 3.85, the highest, with Newbury at 15.04 and Topsfield at 13.61. Nothing here measures traffic volume or cause. This is general information, not legal advice.

The Inversion: The Busy Stretch Is the Safe One

Split the twenty-eight towns into the four segments described at the top and the pattern that emerges is the opposite of what the road looks like from a car.

Segment	Towns	Crashes	Fatal	Fatal per 1,000	Pedestrian per 1,000	Injury share
South surface, Attleboro to Westwood	9	13,300	45	3.38	8.95	23.65%
Borrowed interstate, Dedham to Boston	6	31,320	100	3.19	22.86	25.49%
Borrowed interstate without Boston	5	13,913	35	2.52	16.17	24.81%
North expressway, Chelsea to Peabody	6	14,619	26	1.78	25.99	26.08%
North shore surface, Danvers to Salisbury	7	4,157	16	3.85	7.94	22.80%
Massachusetts	349	405,245	1,087	2.68	14.76	22.89%

The stretch of Route 1 through Saugus, Lynnfield and Peabody is the one people picture when they hear the number. It carries dense commercial traffic, sits under a wall of signage, and produces a great many crashes: those six expressway towns hold 23.06 per cent of the corridor’s crashes. They hold 13.90 per cent of its deaths. At 1.78 fatal crashes per 1,000 they are the least lethal segment on the route by a wide margin, and well under the statewide 2.68.

The seven surface towns north of Danvers are the reverse. They hold 6.56 per cent of the corridor’s crashes and 8.56 per cent of its deaths, at 3.85 fatal crashes per 1,000, the highest of the four segments. Newbury recorded 266 crashes across three years and four fatal ones, a rate of 15.04 per 1,000. Topsfield recorded 294 and four, a rate of 13.61. Saugus, with nearly eight times as many crashes as those two combined, recorded two fatal crashes, a rate of 0.97. Newbury’s rate is 15.5 times Saugus’s.

The data does not say why, and this page will not pretend otherwise: there is no cause field, no speed field and no volume field in the source. What can be said is what the numbers describe. Where crashes are frequent, slow and among many vehicles, more of them end in a claim than in a death. Where crashes are rare and the road is open, a smaller number of them are survivable. Anyone reasoning about risk from the feel of a road is reading the wrong variable.

The Pedestrian Corridor

This is the finding that does not wash out when Boston is removed, and it is the one with the most practical weight.

Route 1 through the inner core is a pedestrian environment sharing space with an expressway. Chelsea recorded 130 pedestrian crashes on 2,920 total, a rate of 44.52 per 1,000, which is three times the statewide 14.76. Malden recorded 104 on 2,791, a rate of 37.26. Revere recorded 75 on 2,298, a rate of 32.64. Boston runs 28.21 and Quincy 24.01. The six expressway towns together sit at 25.99 pedestrian crashes per 1,000.

At the other end of the same road, the seven north shore surface towns run 7.94 and the nine southern surface towns 8.95, both close to half the state figure. Two towns on the route, Topsfield and Newbury with zero and three pedestrian crashes across three years, are effectively not pedestrian environments at all.

Bicycle crashes follow the same shape. Malden runs 18.27 bicycle crashes per 1,000, Boston 15.68 and Chelsea 13.36 against a statewide 10.75, while the southern surface segment sits at 5.71.

A pedestrian claim in Massachusetts turns on different evidence from a vehicle-to-vehicle claim, and the rules that govern it are set out in pedestrian accident rights in Massachusetts. Crash counts for the towns above are published individually at Chelsea, Malden, Revere, Quincy and Boston.

What the Road-Level Data Actually Shows

Across the twenty-eight towns, twenty-two rows in the 2024 road data carry an explicit Route 1 or US 1 label, spread over eleven towns and totalling 413 crashes. That is a small number against 63,396, and the reason is structural rather than surprising: the dataset publishes only each town’s highest-crash roads, and only for towns clearing its reporting threshold, so a route appears in it only where a labelled segment happens to rank near the top of its own town.

The largest single labelled row on the whole route is in Walpole, where a road recorded simply as “Route 1” produced 47 crashes in 2024, the second highest road in that town. Then the Maurice Tobin Bridge in Boston at 29, the Newburyport Turnpike southbound in Peabody at 28, Washington Street northbound in Attleboro at 25, and the Newburyport Turnpike northbound in Peabody at 24. Saugus contributes four separate labelled rows, under four different names, totalling 83 crashes: the road appears there as Route 1 southbound, as the Blue Star Memorial Highway and twice as Broadway. Sharon contributes three, discussed above.

Canton is the same puzzle the site’s Route 128 crash data page describes from the other side. Its 2024 list contains a Yankee Division Highway segment labelled US 1 southbound at 8 crashes, alongside segments of the same legal highway labelled I-93 and I-95. One piece of pavement, three route numbers, one town. For the stretch where US 1 is signed along the interstate, the relevant analysis is in Interstate 93 crash data rather than here.

Five Counties, Five Courthouses

The route crosses five counties, which matters because a civil case is generally brought in the county where the crash happened.

Two towns are in Bristol County: Attleboro and North Attleborough. Twelve are in Norfolk County: Plainville, Wrentham, Foxborough, Walpole, Sharon, Norwood, Westwood, Dedham, Canton, Milton, Quincy and Braintree. Three are in Suffolk County: Boston, Chelsea and Revere. One, Malden, is in Middlesex County. The remaining ten are in Essex County: Saugus, Lynnfield, Peabody, Danvers, Topsfield, Ipswich, Rowley, Newbury, Newburyport and Salisbury.

The Superior Courts for those counties sit at 9 Court Street in Taunton for Bristol, 650 High Street in Dedham for Norfolk, 3 Pemberton Square in Boston for Suffolk, 200 Trade Center in Woburn for Middlesex, and 56 Federal Street in Salem for Essex. Whether a case belongs in the Superior Court or the District Court depends on the amount in controversy rather than on which town the crash was in. Norfolk County’s Superior Court is worth noting for one reason peculiar to this route: it stands in Dedham, on the corridor itself, and Norfolk holds more of these towns than any other county.

What This Means for a Claim

Two things in this data have practical consequences for anyone hurt on this road.

The first is that where on Route 1 a crash happened changes what kind of case it is. A collision in Chelsea or Malden is far more likely to involve a person on foot, in a dense street environment with cameras, witnesses and short sight lines. A collision in Newbury or Topsfield is far more likely to be severe, on an open road, with fewer witnesses and a police reconstruction doing more of the work. Those are different files with different evidence in them, and the deadlines differ too. A death claim runs from the date of death under M.G.L. c. 229, sec. 2 and needs an appointed representative to bring it, which is one of the reasons families arrive with less time left than they expected. Every Massachusetts deadline is set out in the statute of limitations by claim type.

The second is that a great deal of this corridor is publicly maintained highway, bridge and interchange. Where a public body is involved in a crash, M.G.L. c. 258, sec. 4 requires a written presentment within two years, a full year before the ordinary three-year deadline, and missing it ends the claim. That is covered in suing a government entity in Massachusetts.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How many crashes happen on Route 1 in Massachusetts?

A: This data cannot say, and the reason is worth understanding. MassDOT crash records identify the municipality and the road name as the reporting officer entered it, so there is no field that totals a numbered route across town lines. What can be counted is the twenty-eight municipalities Route 1 runs through, which recorded 63,396 crashes over 2022 through 2024, and the individual segments the dataset explicitly labels Route 1 or US 1, of which there are twenty-two in 2024 across eleven towns, totalling 413 crashes. Any figure offered as a total for the whole route would be an estimate wearing a statistic’s clothes.

Q: Is Route 1 more dangerous than other Massachusetts roads?

A: The data cannot answer that, because it contains no measure of how much traffic any road carries. What it can say is that the twenty-eight communities on the route recorded 2.95 fatal crashes per 1,000 against a statewide 2.68, and that the difference is entirely Boston: without Boston the other twenty-seven run 2.65, slightly below the state figure. What holds up without Boston is pedestrian exposure, at 16.46 pedestrian crashes per 1,000 against a statewide 14.76, and the injury share at 24.70 per cent against 22.89 per cent.

Q: Which town on Route 1 has the most crashes?

A: Boston, with 17,407 across 2022 through 2024, which is the highest count of any community in Massachusetts. Quincy is second on the route with 6,455, ranking ninth statewide, then Peabody with 3,746 and twentieth, Attleboro with 3,234 and twenty-ninth, and Chelsea with 2,920 and thirty-second. At the other end, Rowley recorded 237 crashes across the three years, Newbury 266 and Topsfield 294.

Q: Which stretch of Route 1 has the highest death rate?

A: The northern surface stretch, the seven towns from Danvers to Salisbury, at 3.85 fatal crashes per 1,000. That is the quietest part of the route by crash volume, holding 6.56 per cent of the corridor’s crashes, and it produces the highest proportion of deaths. The lowest is the six-town expressway segment from Chelsea to Peabody, at 1.78, which is the stretch most people would name as the dangerous one. Newbury at 15.04 fatal crashes per 1,000 and Topsfield at 13.61 sit at one extreme and Saugus at 0.97 at the other. The source has no cause or volume field, so nothing here explains the gap; it only measures it.

Q: Why does Boston appear in a Route 1 article at all?

A: Because US 1 is signed along Interstate 93 from Canton through downtown Boston, so those miles are legally part of the route even though the pavement belongs to the interstate. That concurrency is why the corridor totals on this page are published twice, once with Boston and once without. For crashes on the interstate itself, the site’s Interstate 93 page is the relevant one.

Q: Sharon shows Route 1 crashes on a road named after a bridge in Lynn. Is that an error?

A: The road name looks like one and the route number does not. Route 1 does run through Sharon, between Walpole and Norwood, so US 1 segments appearing in Sharon’s data are expected. The name attached to all three of them, General Edwards Highway, belongs to a crossing in Lynn about thirty miles away and is almost certainly a data-entry artifact in the underlying crash reports. This page therefore uses the route label and does not repeat the street name as fact.

Q: My crash was on a road that does not appear in this data. Does that matter?

A: Not at all, and it is common along this route. Seven of the twenty-eight communities publish no road breakdown at all because they fall below the dataset’s threshold, and even in the towns that do publish one, only the highest few roads appear. A road’s absence from those lists reflects the size of the threshold rather than anything about the crash that happened on it. What matters to a claim is the crash report, the scene, the medical record and the insurance coverage in play.

Q: Where does this crash data come from and can I check it?

A: MassDOT’s open crash data, the public record built from Massachusetts crash reports, covering calendar years 2022, 2023 and 2024. Fatal counts are MassDOT’s rather than any federal dataset. Road-level counts are for 2024 alone, the most recent complete year. Town-level totals for every Massachusetts community clearing the dataset’s threshold are published at the Massachusetts crash report, and twenty-one of the twenty-eight towns above have their own page there.

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. The figures above describe patterns across three years and twenty-eight communities. They say nothing about who was at fault in any particular collision, and what any individual claim involves depends on facts this article cannot know. For advice about a specific situation, call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS.

Talking to a Lawyer

The useful thing in this data is not the headline. It is that one road produces four different kinds of case depending on where along it you were hurt, and that the part of Route 1 with the worst reputation is the part where a crash is least likely to kill someone.

Jim Glaser Law handles injury claims across Massachusetts, including Boston, Quincy, Malden, Revere and Peabody on this corridor, and the bicycle claims that the inner-core towns generate in numbers well above the state rate are covered at bicycle accidents in Malden. Crash figures for every qualifying community in the Commonwealth are published in the Massachusetts crash report. Fees are contingent, meaning no fee unless there is a recovery, and the client may be responsible for costs and expenses.

The number is (617) JIM-WINS. The line is answered 24 hours a day. The first telephone consultation is offered without charge.