Which Massachusetts Communities Have the Most Crashes on Route 24?

Six Massachusetts towns recorded a segment of Route 24 among their highest-crash roads in 2024, and those segments produced 147 crashes in that single year, according to MassDOT crash records. Randolph leads at 58, followed by West Bridgewater at 23, Raynham at 20, Avon at 18, and Bridgewater and Stoughton tied at 14. Randolph is the striking one: Route 24 northbound and Route 24 southbound are the first and second highest-crash roads in the entire town. But the more useful finding on this corridor is not where the crashes are. It is where the deaths are. Across the eleven communities the highway runs through, the fatality rate per crash varies by a factor of eight, and it runs in the opposite direction to the crash counts: the cities at either end, Fall River and Brockton and Taunton, produce enormous numbers of crashes and comparatively few deaths, while the small towns in the rural middle produce few crashes and a strikingly high share of the fatal ones. Every figure here 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 corridor, call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS. The line is answered 24 hours a day, and the first telephone consultation is free.

The Road, and What the Data Calls It

Route 24 runs roughly forty miles from the Interstate 93 interchange in Randolph south to Interstate 195 in Fall River, cutting through the middle of southeastern Massachusetts and touching three counties on the way.

In MassDOT crash records it does not appear under that name. Its legal name is the AMVETS Memorial Highway, and that is what the crash data calls it, with a route designation of SR24 and a direction attached. This is the same naming problem that makes Route 128 hard to search in the data, and it has the same practical consequence: a police report, an insurer’s file, and a state crash record can each name the same stretch of pavement differently, and the mismatch is not evidence that anyone got the location wrong.

The eleven communities the highway passes through are, from north to south: Randolph, Stoughton and Avon in Norfolk County; Brockton, West Bridgewater and Bridgewater in Plymouth County; and Raynham, Taunton, Berkley, Freetown and Fall River in Bristol County.

The Six Towns Where Route 24 Ranks

These are 2024 counts for segments recorded specifically as AMVETS Memorial Highway. They are per-town figures, not corridor totals, so a highway recorded in six towns’ lists appears six times in the underlying data rather than once.

Community	County	Route 24 crashes, 2024	Where it sits in the town’s road list
Randolph	Norfolk	58	Route 24 north (35, the town’s highest-crash road), Route 24 south (23, second)
West Bridgewater	Plymouth	23	Route 24 north (16, third), Route 24 south (7, sixth)
Raynham	Bristol	20	Route 24 south (20, sixth)
Avon	Norfolk	18	Route 24 south (18, third)
Bridgewater	Plymouth	14	Route 24 south (14, sixth)
Stoughton	Norfolk	14	Route 24 south (14, seventh)

Randolph deserves the attention. In a town that recorded 2,606 crashes across three years and ranks 37th of the state’s 349 communities, the two highest-crash roads are both Route 24, and Interstate 93 takes third and sixth. Four of the town’s top six roads are limited-access highway. That is an unusual profile, and what it describes is a community whose crash picture is dominated by traffic that neither starts nor ends there.

Avon is a smaller version of the same shape. It is the 125th ranked community by crash count, with 945 crashes across three years, and Route 24 southbound is its third busiest crash location behind two local streets.

Note which towns are missing from that table. Brockton, Taunton and Fall River, the three largest communities on the corridor and three of the eight highest-crash communities in Massachusetts, do not carry a Route 24 segment in their top-road lists at all. Their crash counts are dominated by surface streets: Main Street in Brockton at 96 in 2024, County Street in Taunton at 118, Pleasant Street in Fall River at 117. The highway runs past those cities rather than through their crash statistics.

Answer Capsule

Six Massachusetts towns recorded a Route 24 segment among their highest-crash roads in 2024, per MassDOT crash records, totalling 147 crashes on those segments in that year. Randolph led with 58, then West Bridgewater 23, Raynham 20, Avon 18, and Bridgewater and Stoughton tied at 14. In Randolph, Route 24 northbound and southbound are the town’s first and second highest-crash roads. The highway appears in the data as the AMVETS Memorial Highway, route designation SR24, not as Route 24. It does not appear anywhere on the statewide list of roads with the most fatal crashes in 2024, which is led by Interstate 495 northbound at 9. Across the eleven communities the highway runs through, from Randolph to Fall River, MassDOT recorded 34,913 crashes from 2022 through 2024, including 85 fatal, 8,856 involving injury, 219 involving a bicycle and 548 involving a pedestrian. That is 8.62 per cent of the statewide crash total of 405,245 and 7.82 per cent of the state’s 1,087 fatal crashes, giving the corridor 2.43 fatal crashes per 1,000 against a statewide 2.68. The fatality rate varies eightfold within the corridor and runs opposite to the crash counts: Berkley 9.6 fatal per 1,000, Freetown 7.0 and West Bridgewater 6.2 at the top, against Fall River 1.2, Randolph 1.5 and Taunton 1.8 at the bottom, despite Fall River, Brockton and Taunton ranking fifth, seventh and eighth among all 349 Massachusetts communities for total crashes. The eleven towns span three counties, so cases are heard in Norfolk Superior Court at 650 High Street in Dedham, Plymouth Superior Court at 72 Belmont Street in Brockton, or Bristol Superior Court at 9 Court Street in Taunton, the last two sitting on the corridor itself. Call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS; the first telephone consultation is free.

The Fatality Spread Is the Real Story

Here is the corridor community by community, ordered by fatal crashes per 1,000 crashes rather than by crash count, because that ordering is what makes the pattern visible.

Community	County	Crashes 2022-2024	Fatal	Fatal per 1,000	Statewide crash rank
Berkley	Bristol	415	4	9.6	205th
Freetown	Bristol	713	5	7.0	154th
West Bridgewater	Plymouth	1,455	9	6.2	85th
Stoughton	Norfolk	2,350	8	3.4	39th
Avon	Norfolk	945	3	3.2	125th
Bridgewater	Plymouth	1,575	5	3.2	75th
Brockton	Plymouth	7,378	20	2.7	7th
Raynham	Bristol	1,787	4	2.2	57th
Taunton	Bristol	6,644	12	1.8	8th
Randolph	Norfolk	2,606	4	1.5	37th
Fall River	Bristol	9,045	11	1.2	5th

The statewide rate is 2.68 fatal crashes per 1,000. Berkley sits at three and a half times that. Fall River, the highest-crash community on the corridor and the fifth highest in Massachusetts, sits at less than half of it.

The ordering is close to an inversion of the crash-count ordering, and the explanation is not mysterious. It is speed and it is density. A dense city street network produces very large numbers of collisions at low speeds, most of which are property damage or minor injury. A rural or semi-rural town on a fast highway produces far fewer collisions, but a larger share of the ones it does produce happen at speeds that kill people.

That is a genuine finding and it deserves to be stated carefully, because it is easy to misread. Berkley’s rate of 9.6 rests on four fatal crashes out of 415. Small numbers move a lot on one additional event, and nothing here says that driving in Berkley is three times more dangerous per trip than driving in Massachusetts generally. What the numbers support is narrower and still useful: on this corridor, the severe outcomes cluster in the thinly populated middle, not in the cities at either end where the crash counts pile up.

Berkley and Freetown fall below the crash dataset’s threshold for a published town page, so their figures appear here but not at a town-level page of their own. Every other community on the corridor has one: Randolph, Stoughton, Avon, Brockton, West Bridgewater, Bridgewater, Raynham, Taunton and Fall River.

What the Corridor Looks Like in Aggregate

Adding the eleven communities together gives a picture of the whole route. From 2022 through 2024 they recorded 34,913 crashes, 85 of them fatal, 8,856 involving injury, 219 involving a bicycle and 548 involving a pedestrian. That is roughly 11,600 crashes a year across the corridor.

Set against statewide totals of 405,245 crashes and 1,087 fatal crashes, the eleven towns hold 8.62 per cent of the state’s crashes and 7.82 per cent of its fatal crashes. As a ratio, the corridor produced 2.43 fatal crashes per 1,000 against a statewide 2.68, so in aggregate it runs slightly below the state fatality rate, which the town-level table already explains: the three big cities contribute most of the crashes and comparatively few of the deaths, and they dominate the aggregate.

Two other measures are worth pulling out because they run in different directions.

Injury involvement runs above the state. A quarter of the corridor’s crashes involved injury, 25.4 per cent, against 22.9 per cent statewide. More crashes here hurt someone, even though fewer of them kill.

Bicycle involvement runs well below the state. The corridor recorded 6.27 bicycle crashes per 1,000 against a statewide 10.75, close to half the state figure. Pedestrian involvement is slightly above, at 15.70 per 1,000 against 14.76. That mix describes a car-first corridor: high-speed highway and arterial driving, comparatively little cycling.

Route 24 Is Not on the State’s Deadliest Roads List

It is worth saying what the data does not show, because the honest version of a road-safety piece includes the negative result.

MassDOT’s 2024 records produce a statewide list of individual roads with the most fatal crashes. Interstate 495 northbound tops it at 9. Interstate 93 northbound, the Massachusetts Turnpike westbound, Route 3 southbound and a South Street each recorded 3. A larger group tied at 2 includes Route 128 southbound, both directions of US Route 1, Route 28 northbound, Route 110 eastbound, Interstate 495 southbound, both directions of Interstate 91, Interstate 195 westbound and Interstate 290 eastbound.

No segment of Route 24 appears on that list.

That is not the same as saying the highway is safe, and it is not the same as saying nobody has died on it. It means that in the most recent complete year of records, no single directional segment of Route 24 accumulated enough fatal crashes to place on a statewide list. Fatal crashes are rare events spread thinly across a long road, and a corridor can carry real risk without any one segment ranking. What the corridor’s fatality burden shows up as instead is the town-level pattern above, where the towns the highway passes through carry high fatal rates on modest crash counts.

The Three Counties Problem

A forty-mile highway crossing three county lines creates a practical complication that does not exist on a road inside one county.

Which court hears an injury case depends on where the crash happened and, for larger claims, on the amount in dispute. A crash in Randolph, Stoughton or Avon is Norfolk County, heard at Norfolk Superior Court, 650 High Street in Dedham. A crash in Brockton, West Bridgewater or Bridgewater is Plymouth County, heard at Plymouth Superior Court, 72 Belmont Street in Brockton, which sits directly on the corridor. A crash in Raynham, Taunton, Berkley, Freetown or Fall River is Bristol County, heard at Bristol Superior Court, 9 Court Street in Taunton, also on the corridor.

The line between District Court and Superior Court is a procedural amount rather than a hard jurisdictional wall, and it has moved over time, so it is worth confirming rather than assuming when a claim sits near it.

Two exit ramps can put a crash in different counties, with different courts, different clerks and different local practice. It is not a difference that changes what the law is. It is a difference that changes where and how the case runs, and it is one of the few things about a corridor crash that is worth knowing early.

What the Numbers Do and Do Not Tell You About Your Own Crash

Crash counts describe traffic volume as much as they describe risk. County Street in Taunton recorded 118 crashes in 2024 because a great many vehicles use it, not because it is uniquely dangerous per trip. Route 24 in Randolph recorded 58 for the same reason. The data has no denominator: it counts crashes, not crashes per million vehicle miles, so a busy road will always look worse than a quiet one even when the quiet one is riskier to drive.

For an individual claim, none of this decides anything. Fault in a Massachusetts crash is decided from the evidence of that collision: the crash report, the scene, the vehicle damage, the medical records, and what the people involved and any witnesses say. Under M.G.L. c. 231, sec. 85, damages are reduced in proportion to each party’s share of the negligence, and recovery is barred only once your own share is greater than the combined share of those you are claiming against. The same section provides that “the plaintiff shall be presumed to have been in the exercise of due care,” which puts the burden of proving otherwise on the party asserting it. That framework is set out in comparative negligence in Massachusetts and in how fault is determined after a Massachusetts crash.

The deadline does not vary by county. M.G.L. c. 260, sec. 2A provides that tort actions “shall be commenced only within three years next after the cause of action accrues,” discussed in the Massachusetts statute of limitations.

Where local crash history can matter is context rather than proof. A documented pattern at a particular interchange is a fact an investigation can use, and it can bear on a claim against a road authority, which carries notice requirements of its own covered in suing a government entity in Massachusetts. A high-speed corridor crash also raises the practical questions covered in reporting a car accident and, where a commercial vehicle is involved, in truck accident claims.

For local practice detail on the three corridor cities with dedicated pages, including venues and hospitals, see Fall River auto accidents, Brockton auto accidents and Taunton auto accidents, along with Fall River personal injury and Brockton truck accidents.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Which town has the most Route 24 crashes in Massachusetts?

A: Randolph, with 58 crashes recorded on Route 24 segments in 2024 according to MassDOT crash records. Route 24 northbound at 35 and Route 24 southbound at 23 are the town’s first and second highest-crash roads. West Bridgewater follows at 23, then Raynham at 20, Avon at 18, and Bridgewater and Stoughton tied at 14. Those six towns are the only ones that carry a Route 24 segment in their 2024 top-road list.

Q: Why does Route 24 not show up in the Fall River, Brockton or Taunton crash data?

A: Because in those cities the highway is a small part of a very large crash picture. Fall River recorded 9,045 crashes across three years, Brockton 7,378 and Taunton 6,644, and their top-road lists are entirely surface streets: Pleasant Street in Fall River at 117 crashes in 2024, County Street in Taunton at 118, Main Street in Brockton at 96. The Route 24 mileage inside those cities does not produce enough crashes to displace a busy urban arterial from the list.

Q: How dangerous is Route 24 compared with other Massachusetts highways?

A: No segment of Route 24 appears on MassDOT’s 2024 list of roads with the most fatal crashes, which is led by Interstate 495 northbound at 9. What the data does show is that the towns the highway runs through carry high fatality rates on modest crash counts, with Berkley at 9.6 fatal crashes per 1,000, Freetown at 7.0 and West Bridgewater at 6.2 against a statewide 2.68. That is a real pattern, but it describes the towns, not any one stretch of road, and small towns move a long way on a single additional fatal crash.

Q: How many crashes happen along the Route 24 corridor each year?

A: Roughly 11,600. Across the eleven communities the highway runs through, MassDOT recorded 34,913 crashes from 2022 through 2024, an average of about 11,638 a year. Those crashes included 85 fatal, 8,856 involving injury, 219 involving a bicycle and 548 involving a pedestrian, which is 8.62 per cent of the 405,245 crashes recorded statewide over the same period.

Q: Is the Route 24 corridor more dangerous than the rest of Massachusetts?

A: Not by fatality rate in aggregate. The corridor recorded 2.43 fatal crashes per 1,000 against a statewide 2.68, and produced 7.82 per cent of the state’s fatal crashes from 8.62 per cent of its crashes. It runs above the state on injury involvement, at 25.4 per cent of crashes against 22.9 per cent, and well below on bicycle involvement, at 6.27 per 1,000 against 10.75. The aggregate hides a wide internal spread, which the town-level table shows.

Q: Which court would hear a Route 24 crash case?

A: It depends on which town the crash happened in, because the corridor crosses three counties. Randolph, Stoughton and Avon are Norfolk County, heard at Norfolk Superior Court, 650 High Street in Dedham. Brockton, West Bridgewater and Bridgewater are Plymouth County, heard at Plymouth Superior Court, 72 Belmont Street in Brockton. Raynham, Taunton, Berkley, Freetown and Fall River are Bristol County, heard at Bristol Superior Court, 9 Court Street in Taunton. Whether a claim goes to District Court or Superior Court turns on the amount in dispute, and that dividing amount has changed over time, so it is worth confirming for a current case.

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 come from those same MassDOT records. Road-level counts are for 2024 alone, the most recent complete year. Town-level totals are published for every Massachusetts community clearing the dataset’s threshold at the Massachusetts crash report, and the figures above can be checked against the Randolph, Brockton, Taunton and Fall River town pages. Berkley and Freetown fall below that threshold and have no town page, so their figures are given here from the underlying dataset.

Q: Does the crash history of a road affect my claim?

A: Not directly. Fault is decided from the evidence of the particular collision, and under M.G.L. c. 231, sec. 85 damages are reduced in proportion to each party’s share of the negligence, with recovery barred only once your share is greater than the combined share of those you claim against. Crash history can matter as context, and it can matter more in a claim against a road authority, which carries its own notice requirements. It is never a substitute for the crash report, the photographs and the medical records.

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 eleven communities; they say nothing about any particular collision. For advice about a specific situation, call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS.

Talking to a Lawyer

Corridor data is useful for understanding how crashes happen on a road like Route 24, and it is genuinely informative about the shape of the risk: heavy volume and low severity at the urban ends, light volume and high severity through the middle. It cannot tell you what any individual claim is worth or who was at fault, because those come from the crash report, the medical records, the photographs and the insurance policies actually in play.

What corridor cases do tend to involve is speed, which means more serious injuries, and county lines, which means the case may run in a court most people in the town have never been to.

Jim Glaser Law handles injury claims along the whole length of the corridor, from Randolph and Stoughton at the top through Brockton and the Bridgewaters to Taunton and Fall River. 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.