How Dangerous Is Route 6 in Massachusetts? Crash Data From Seekonk to Provincetown

US Route 6 crosses Massachusetts from the Rhode Island line at Seekonk to the tip of Cape Cod at Provincetown, and the twenty-three cities and towns it passes through recorded 44,530 crashes from 2022 through 2024, including 94 fatal crashes, 10,268 crashes involving injury, 433 involving a bicycle and 609 involving a pedestrian. That is 10.99 per cent of every crash in the Commonwealth from twenty-three of its three hundred and forty-nine communities. The corridor is nonetheless less lethal per crash than the state as a whole, at 2.11 fatal crashes per 1,000 against a statewide 2.68, and the reason is the single most useful thing in this data: the crashes are concentrated in New Bedford and Fall River, which between them hold 4.96 per cent of all Massachusetts crashes and have fatal rates less than half the state average, while the deaths are concentrated in the smaller towns either side of them, which run 3.54 fatal crashes per 1,000. The Cape half of the route is a different problem again, producing bicycle crashes at 15.66 per 1,000 against a statewide 10.75, and 23.46 per 1,000 across the lower and outer Cape. 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.

The Twenty-Three Communities, and Where the Numbers Come From

Route 6 enters Massachusetts from Rhode Island at Seekonk and runs east through Swansea and Somerset, across the Taunton River into Fall River, then through Westport, Dartmouth, New Bedford and Fairhaven, out along the coast through Mattapoisett, Marion and Wareham, over the Cape Cod Canal at Bourne, and up the length of the Cape through Sandwich, Barnstable, Yarmouth, Dennis, Harwich, Brewster, Orleans, Eastham, Wellfleet and Truro to Provincetown.

Those twenty-three municipalities sit in three counties. Eight are in Bristol County: Seekonk, Swansea, Somerset, Fall River, Westport, Dartmouth, New Bedford and Fairhaven. Three are in Plymouth County: Mattapoisett, Marion and Wareham. The remaining twelve are in Barnstable County. That matters for one practical reason set out at the end of this page, which is that a civil case is generally brought in the county where the crash happened, and this route crosses three of them.

The crash 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. The 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, the 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.

Two limitations belong at the top rather than in a footnote, because both of them constrain what any honest reading of this page can conclude.

The first is that MassDOT crash records contain no traffic volume. They cannot distinguish 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 a reason for any pattern.

The second is about road names, and it is the reason this article is careful about the phrase “on Route 6”. The source records a road as the officer filling in the report wrote it, which means one stretch of highway can appear under several labels in the same town, and some labels turn up attached to towns the route does not reach at all. The rule applied throughout this page is narrow and stated so it can be checked: a road is described as Route 6 only where the dataset itself labels a road of that name in that same town with “Rte 6” or “US6”. Seven of the twenty-three towns meet that test. Everywhere else, the town’s highest-crash roads are reported as exactly that, with no claim about which route they carry.

Every Town on the Route

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

Town	County	Crashes	Fatal	Injury	Bicycle	Pedestrian	Rank	Fatal per 1,000
Seekonk	Bristol	2,167	5	402	12	7	46th	2.31
Swansea	Bristol	1,722	7	445	3	10	63rd	4.07
Somerset	Bristol	1,330	8	323	8	9	93rd	6.02
Fall River	Bristol	9,045	11	2,286	65	213	5th	1.22
Westport	Bristol	1,108	3	246	4	4	106th	2.71
Dartmouth	Bristol	1,763	6	570	14	22	58th	3.40
New Bedford	Bristol	11,070	14	2,330	99	197	4th	1.26
Fairhaven	Bristol	1,559	3	261	15	6	76th	1.92
Mattapoisett	Plymouth	378	1	66	4	0	211th	2.65
Marion	Plymouth	414	1	83	2	0	206th	2.42
Wareham	Plymouth	1,716	9	476	15	12	65th	5.24
Bourne	Barnstable	2,172	1	428	10	14	45th	0.46
Sandwich	Barnstable	1,016	2	202	6	7	116th	1.97
Barnstable	Barnstable	3,703	13	940	55	55	21st	3.51
Yarmouth	Barnstable	1,744	4	414	36	15	60th	2.29
Dennis	Barnstable	1,047	0	220	22	7	113th	0.00
Harwich	Barnstable	801	1	200	9	4	144th	1.25
Brewster	Barnstable	378	2	68	12	2	212th	5.29
Orleans	Barnstable	304	0	90	8	8	226th	0.00
Eastham	Barnstable	404	1	89	10	4	208th	2.48
Wellfleet	Barnstable	299	2	64	3	1	229th	6.69
Truro	Barnstable	65	0	12	1	0	298th	0.00
Provincetown	Barnstable	325	0	53	20	12	221st	0.00
All 23		44,530	94	10,268	433	609		2.11
Massachusetts		405,245	1,087	92,759	4,356	5,980		2.68

Answer Capsule

The twenty-three Massachusetts cities and towns on US Route 6, from Seekonk on the Rhode Island line to Provincetown at the end of Cape Cod, recorded 44,530 crashes from 2022 through 2024 according to MassDOT crash records, including 94 fatal crashes, 10,268 involving injury, 433 involving a bicycle and 609 involving a pedestrian. That is 10.99 per cent of the 405,245 crashes recorded statewide and 8.65 per cent of the 1,087 fatal ones, so the corridor’s fatal rate of 2.11 per 1,000 crashes sits below the statewide 2.68. The volume is concentrated in two cities: New Bedford recorded 11,070 crashes and Fall River 9,045, fourth and fifth of all 349 Massachusetts communities, and between them 4.96 per cent of every crash in the Commonwealth. Their fatal rates are the lowest kind of figure in the data, 1.26 and 1.22 per 1,000, less than half the state average. The deaths sit in the smaller towns instead: the nine other South Coast municipalities on the route recorded 12,157 crashes and 43 fatal crashes, a rate of 3.54 per 1,000, which is 2.85 times the two cities and about a third above the state. Somerset is highest at 6.02, then Wareham at 5.24 and Swansea at 4.07. The pedestrian pattern runs the other way: Fall River at 23.55 pedestrian crashes per 1,000 and New Bedford at 17.80 are both above the statewide 14.76, while the nine smaller towns run 5.76. The twelve Cape municipalities on the route recorded 12,258 crashes with 192 involving a bicycle, a rate of 15.66 per 1,000 against 10.75 statewide, and the eight lower and outer Cape towns among them run 23.46 per 1,000, more than double the state; Provincetown recorded 20 bicycle crashes on 325 total, 61.54 per 1,000. Barnstable is the busiest crash location on the Cape half at 3,703 crashes, twenty-first statewide, with 13 fatal. Named Route 6 segments appear as the highest-crash road in their town in Seekonk, where Fall River Avenue recorded 102 crashes in 2024, in Swansea, where the Grand Army of the Republic Highway recorded 42, and in Dartmouth, where State Road recorded 47; in Somerset the Grand Army of the Republic Highway recorded 40, second in the town to County Street at 48. Eight of the twenty-three towns are below the dataset’s threshold for any road breakdown at all. MassDOT crash records contain no traffic volume and no cause field, so this data cannot separate a dangerous road from a busy one and identifies no reason for any pattern. Civil cases from the Bristol County section are heard at the Superior Court’s New Bedford sitting at 441 County St., which mass.gov identifies as the county’s civil location, and at Fall River at 186 S. Main St.; Cape cases go to Barnstable County Superior Court at 3195 Main St. in Barnstable; the three Plymouth County towns go to Plymouth County Superior Court on Obery Street in Plymouth. This is general information and not legal advice. Call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS; the first telephone consultation is offered without charge.

Finding One: The Two Cities Carry the Volume and Not the Deaths

New Bedford recorded 11,070 crashes over the three years and Fall River 9,045. They are fourth and fifth of all 349 Massachusetts communities, behind only Boston, Worcester and Springfield. Between them that is 20,115 crashes, which is 4.96 per cent of every crash in the Commonwealth generated by two of its three hundred and forty-nine communities.

Now look at what those crashes are. The two cities together produced 25 fatal crashes on 20,115, a rate of 1.24 per 1,000. The statewide rate is 2.68. New Bedford is 1.26 and Fall River is 1.22, and both are among the lowest ratios of any Massachusetts community recording more than a thousand crashes.

That combination is not a paradox and it is not good news. It is the signature of dense urban street networks: enormous numbers of collisions at intersections, in parking lots and in stop-and-go traffic, most of them at speeds people survive. The injury share confirms it. New Bedford recorded 2,330 injury crashes and Fall River 2,286, which is 21.0 and 25.3 per cent of their crashes against a statewide 22.9 per cent. These are cities producing a very large number of ordinary, damaging, survivable crashes.

The pedestrian numbers are where urban density stops being benign. Fall River recorded 213 pedestrian crashes, a rate of 23.55 per 1,000 crashes against a statewide 14.76. New Bedford recorded 197, a rate of 17.80. Both are above the state, and Fall River’s is the higher of the two by a clear margin. In a corridor whose overall pedestrian rate is below the state average, the two cities are the exception, and they are the exception by a lot.

Practice-area pages with the town-level crash detail for both cities are at car accidents in New Bedford and car accidents in Fall River, and the county context for all eight Bristol County towns on this route is in the Bristol County crash data piece.

Finding Two: The Deaths Are in the Smaller Towns

Take the two cities out and look at the other nine South Coast municipalities the route passes through: Seekonk, Swansea, Somerset, Westport, Dartmouth, Fairhaven, Mattapoisett, Marion and Wareham.

Those nine recorded 12,157 crashes and 43 fatal crashes. That is 3.54 fatal crashes per 1,000, about a third above the statewide rate and 2.85 times the rate in New Bedford and Fall River. On roughly 60 per cent of the two cities’ crash volume, these nine towns produced 72 per cent more deaths.

Inside that group the effect concentrates further. Somerset recorded 8 fatal crashes on 1,330, a rate of 6.02 per 1,000. Wareham recorded 9 on 1,716, a rate of 5.24. Swansea recorded 7 on 1,722, a rate of 4.07. All three are more than half again the state average, and Somerset is more than double it. Fairhaven, by contrast, sits at 1.92 and Seekonk at 2.31, so this is not a uniform property of small towns on the route.

The pedestrian figure for the nine is 5.76 per 1,000, well under the statewide 14.76 and a quarter of Fall River’s. So the two halves of the South Coast section are close to being mirror images: cities with high crash volume, low lethality and high pedestrian exposure, and towns with lower volume, higher lethality and very few pedestrian crashes.

This data shows that pattern. It does not explain it, and nothing in the source would let it. There is no traffic volume, no speed field and no cause field in MassDOT crash records, so any account of why the smaller towns are deadlier per crash would be something this article made up rather than something it measured.

Finding Three: The Cape Half Is a Bicycle Corridor

The twelve Barnstable County municipalities on Route 6 recorded 12,258 crashes over the three years, 27.5 per cent of the corridor total. Their fatal rate of 2.12 per 1,000 is almost identical to the corridor’s overall 2.11 and below the state’s 2.68. On the ordinary measures, in other words, this stretch is unremarkable.

The bicycle figures are not. Those twelve towns recorded 192 crashes involving a bicycle, a rate of 15.66 per 1,000 crashes against a statewide 10.75. Narrow it to the eight lower and outer Cape towns on the route, Dennis, Harwich, Brewster, Orleans, Eastham, Wellfleet, Truro and Provincetown, and the rate rises to 23.46 per 1,000, more than double the state figure.

The individual towns are starker still. Provincetown recorded 20 bicycle crashes on 325 total, a rate of 61.54 per 1,000, roughly five and three quarter times the state. Brewster is at 31.75, Orleans at 26.32, Eastham at 24.75, Dennis at 21.01 and Yarmouth at 20.64. Barnstable, the largest Cape community on the route, recorded 55 bicycle crashes, the highest count on the corridor after New Bedford’s 99, at a rate of 14.85 per 1,000.

Provincetown also has the corridor’s highest pedestrian rate at 36.92 per 1,000, on twelve pedestrian crashes. Those are small counts and they move a great deal on a single incident, which is why they are reported here as rates alongside their raw numbers rather than as a ranking.

Barnstable is the other town worth naming on this stretch, and for a different reason: 3,703 crashes puts it twenty-first among all 349 Massachusetts communities, and its 13 fatal crashes are a high count for a town of that crash volume, giving it a fatal rate of 3.51 per 1,000. Bourne, second on the Cape section at 2,172 crashes, recorded a single fatal crash across the entire three years, a rate of 0.46 per 1,000 that is the lowest of any community on this route recording more than a thousand crashes. Full county context is in the Cape Cod crash data piece, and the town-level detail sits on the Barnstable crash page and the Yarmouth crash page.

The Named Route 6 Segments

These are the roads the dataset itself labels with “Rte 6” or “US6” in the same town, with 2024 counts. Nothing else on this page is called Route 6.

Town	Road as recorded	2024 crashes	Position in town
Seekonk	Fall River Avenue	102	highest in town
Dartmouth	State Road	47	highest in town
Swansea	Grand Army of the Republic Highway	42	highest in town
Somerset	Grand Army of the Republic Highway	40	second, behind County Street at 48
Seekonk	Fall River Avenue, Route 6	22	separate row in the source
Swansea	Grand Army of the Republic Highway, Route 6 west	22	separate row in the source
Seekonk	Fall River Avenue, Route 6 west	20	separate row in the source
Dartmouth	State Road, Route 6 east	19	separate row in the source
Seekonk	Fall River Avenue, Route 6 east	18	separate row in the source
Dartmouth	State Road, Route 6 west	17	separate row in the source
Bourne	Mid-Cape Highway, Route 6 west	16	third in town
Sandwich	Mid-Cape Highway, Route 6 east	5	seventh in town
Harwich	Route 6 eastbound and westbound	3 each	sixth and seventh in town

Those rows are not added together anywhere on this page, and the reason is worth stating. The source clearly records the same stretch of road more than once, sometimes with a direction suffix and sometimes without, because different officers wrote it differently. Summing them would double count. What the table does support is a ranking within each town, and there the picture is consistent: in Seekonk, Swansea and Dartmouth the Route 6 through-route is the highest-crash road in the municipality, and in Somerset it is second.

The Cape figures are low for a different reason. The Mid-Cape Highway is a limited-access road for much of its length, and the towns it runs through record their highest crash counts on the surface roads instead. In Barnstable the highest 2024 count is Falmouth Road, Route 28, at 173, then Iyannough Road at 102. In Yarmouth it is Route 28 at 92. In Dennis it is Route 134 at 51.

Elsewhere on the corridor, the highest 2024 counts belong to roads this article makes no route claim about: Wareham’s Cranberry Highway at 124, New Bedford’s Acushnet Avenue at 117 and County Street at 94, Fall River’s Pleasant Street at 117 and Plymouth Avenue at 114, Fairhaven’s Huttleston Avenue at 47 and Westport’s State Road at 39.

Eight of the twenty-three towns publish no road breakdown at all, because they fall below the threshold at which the source records road-level detail: Mattapoisett, Marion, Brewster, Orleans, Eastham, Wellfleet, Truro and Provincetown. Their crashes are in every town-level figure above. They are simply absent from the road table, and a road’s absence from that table says something about the size of the dataset’s threshold rather than anything about the road.

Which Court Hears a Route 6 Case

A civil case arising from a crash is generally brought in the county where the crash happened, and this route crosses three of them. Each of the following was read from the Trial Court’s own location pages on mass.gov on 22 August 2026.

For the eight Bristol County towns, from Seekonk through Fairhaven, the Superior Court’s civil work sits at 441 County St. in New Bedford, which the location page identifies as handling only civil matters, and at 186 S. Main St. in Fall River. The Taunton location at 9 Court St. states on its own page that it handles criminal matters only, which is worth knowing before anyone drives to it with a civil filing.

For the three Plymouth County towns, Mattapoisett, Marion and Wareham, Plymouth County Superior Court is on Obery Street in Plymouth and serves the whole county, with criminal sessions in Brockton.

For the twelve Barnstable County towns, from Bourne to Provincetown, Barnstable County Superior Court sits at 3195 Main St. in Barnstable and serves all fifteen towns of the county.

Whether a case belongs in the Superior Court or the District Court turns on the amount in controversy and on procedural rules rather than on geography, and the law applied is the same across the Commonwealth. What changes along this route is distance. From Provincetown to the Barnstable courthouse is the length of the Cape.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How many crashes happen on Route 6 in Massachusetts?

A: The honest answer is that this data cannot say, and it is worth understanding why. 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-three municipalities Route 6 runs through, which recorded 44,530 crashes over 2022 through 2024, and the individual road segments the dataset explicitly labels as Route 6 or US 6, the largest of which is Fall River Avenue in Seekonk at 102 crashes in 2024. Any figure presented as a total for the whole route would be an estimate wearing a statistic’s clothes.

Q: Which town on Route 6 has the most crashes?

A: New Bedford, with 11,070 crashes across 2022 through 2024, which ranks it fourth among all 349 Massachusetts communities. Fall River is second on the route with 9,045, ranking fifth statewide. Barnstable is third with 3,703 and twenty-first statewide, then Bourne at 2,172 and Seekonk at 2,167. At the other end, Truro recorded 65 crashes across the three years, Wellfleet 299 and Orleans 304.

Q: Is Route 6 more dangerous than other Massachusetts roads?

A: This data cannot answer that, because it contains no measure of how much traffic any road carries. What it can say is that the communities on this route recorded a fatal rate of 2.11 crashes per 1,000 against a statewide 2.68, so a crash in these twenty-three towns was less likely to be a fatal one than a crash elsewhere in Massachusetts. That is a statement about crashes that happened, not about the risk of driving a mile. It is also an average that conceals a wide split, with New Bedford and Fall River at 1.26 and 1.22 per 1,000 and Somerset at 6.02.

Q: Why do the smaller towns on Route 6 have higher death rates than the cities?

A: The data shows the pattern clearly and explains none of it. The nine smaller South Coast municipalities on the route recorded 43 fatal crashes on 12,157 crashes, a rate of 3.54 per 1,000, while New Bedford and Fall River recorded 25 on 20,115, a rate of 1.24. MassDOT crash records contain no cause field, no speed data and no traffic volume, so nothing in the source identifies why. Anything further would be speculation, and this page does not offer it.

Q: How many bicycle crashes happen on Cape Cod?

A: The twelve Barnstable County towns on Route 6 recorded 192 crashes involving a bicycle from 2022 through 2024, out of 12,258 crashes in total, a rate of 15.66 per 1,000 against a statewide 10.75. The eight lower and outer Cape towns among them, Dennis through Provincetown, run 23.46 per 1,000. Provincetown alone recorded 20 bicycle crashes on 325 crashes, a rate of 61.54 per 1,000, though on counts that small a single year moves the figure a great deal.

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. Eight of the twenty-three towns 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 eight 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: Which court would hear a Route 6 crash case?

A: It depends which of the three counties the crash was in. The eight Bristol County towns from Seekonk to Fairhaven go to Bristol County Superior Court, whose civil sittings are at 441 County St. in New Bedford and 186 S. Main St. in Fall River; the Taunton courthouse at 9 Court St. states on its own mass.gov page that it handles criminal matters only. Mattapoisett, Marion and Wareham are Plymouth County, whose Superior Court is on Obery Street in Plymouth. The twelve Cape towns are Barnstable County, whose Superior Court is at 3195 Main St. in Barnstable. Whether a case belongs in the Superior Court or the District Court depends on the amount in controversy, not on which town the crash was in.

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 each of the twenty-three towns above can be checked against its 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-three 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

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

The first is that where a crash happened on Route 6 changes what kind of crash it was likely to be. In New Bedford and Fall River the crashes are dense, frequent, and disproportionately involve people on foot. In Somerset, Swansea and Wareham they are fewer and more often fatal. Those are different cases with different evidence in them, and a claim arising from a pedestrian collision on a city street and a claim arising from a fatal collision on a two-lane road ten miles away are not variations on the same file. 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 this route runs past a great deal of publicly maintained road, canal crossing and state highway. 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.

Jim Glaser Law handles injury claims across Massachusetts, including the South Coast cities of New Bedford and Fall River and the towns along the Cape. 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.