Which Massachusetts Communities Have the Most Crashes on Route 9?

Eight Massachusetts communities recorded a segment of Route 9 among their eight highest-crash roads in 2024, and those segments produced 807 crashes in that single year, according to MassDOT crash records. Hadley leads at 157, followed by Wellesley at 135, Westborough at 128, Natick at 122, Shrewsbury at 115, Southborough at 89, Framingham at 54 and Northborough at 7. In seven of those eight towns, Route 9 is not merely on the list. It is the single highest-crash road in the town. And there is a catch buried in the data that matters to anyone trying to look their own crash up: MassDOT wrote the route number into only 283 of those 807 crashes. The other 524 are recorded under a local street name, with no number attached, which is why a search for Route 9 in the state’s own crash data returns roughly a third of the road. 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. The first telephone consultation is offered without charge.

One Road, a Dozen Names

Route 9 runs from Brookline west to Pittsfield, crossing the state and passing through five counties on the way: Norfolk, Middlesex, Worcester, Hampshire and Berkshire. Unlike Interstate 90 or Interstate 495, it is a surface road for almost all of that distance, which means traffic lights, driveways, left turns across oncoming traffic and pedestrians on foot, all at speeds that in places are close to highway speeds.

It also has no single name. In the crash record it appears as Worcester Street in Wellesley and Natick, Worcester Road in Framingham, Turnpike Road in Southborough and Westborough, Boston Turnpike in Shrewsbury, Belmont Street in Northborough, and Russell Street in Hadley. Those are seven different names for one continuous road, and that is only the stretch that reaches a town’s top-eight list.

This is the same problem the Route 128 corridor has, where the crash record uses the legal name Yankee Division Highway, and the same one Route 24 has, where it appears as the AMVETS Memorial Highway. The mechanism is different here. Route 128 is recorded under an official name most drivers never use. Route 9 is recorded under the ordinary local street name, town by town, with the route number attached only some of the time.

The practical consequence is worth spelling out, because people run into it. A police report, an insurer’s claim file, a hospital record and a state crash record can each name the same stretch of pavement differently. A mismatch between them is not evidence that somebody wrote down the wrong place.

Eight Communities, 807 Crashes

These are 2024 counts, drawn from each town’s own list of its eight highest-crash roads. They are per-town figures rather than a corridor tally kept by the state, so a road appearing in eight towns’ lists appears eight times in the underlying data rather than once.

Community	County	Route 9 crashes, 2024	Rank in the town’s own road list
Hadley	Hampshire	157	Russell Street is the town’s highest-crash road
Wellesley	Norfolk	135	Worcester Street is the town’s highest-crash road
Westborough	Worcester	128	Turnpike Road is the town’s highest-crash road
Natick	Middlesex	122	Worcester Street is second, behind Speen Street
Shrewsbury	Worcester	115	Boston Turnpike is the town’s highest-crash road
Southborough	Worcester	89	Turnpike Road is the town’s highest-crash road
Framingham	Middlesex	54	Worcester Road is the town’s highest-crash road
Northborough	Worcester	7	seventh, behind both directions of Interstate 290

Seven of the eight. In Hadley, Wellesley, Westborough, Shrewsbury, Southborough and Framingham, Route 9 under its local name is the number one crash location in the community, and in Natick it is second only to Speen Street, a road that intersects it.

That is a different pattern from the interstate corridors. On Interstate 495 and Interstate 93, the highway is usually one entry among several in a town that also has busy surface streets. On Route 9, in most of the towns it crosses, the road is the crash picture.

Answer Capsule

Eight Massachusetts communities recorded a Route 9 segment among their eight highest-crash roads in 2024, per MassDOT crash records, and those segments produced 807 crashes in that year. Hadley led with 157, then Wellesley 135, Westborough 128, Natick 122, Shrewsbury 115, Southborough 89, Framingham 54 and Northborough 7. In seven of the eight, Route 9 under its local street name is the town’s highest-crash road, the exception being Natick where it ranks second behind Speen Street. Only 283 of the 807 crashes, about 35 per cent, are tagged in the data with the Route 9 number; the rest appear under local names including Worcester Street, Worcester Road, Turnpike Road, Boston Turnpike, Belmont Street and Russell Street. Hadley is the outlier: it ranks 119th of the state’s 349 communities for total crashes, yet Russell Street alone recorded 142 crashes in 2024, more than any single road in Wellesley, Shrewsbury, Framingham or Natick. Across the 26 communities the road passes through between Brookline and Pittsfield, MassDOT recorded 46,056 crashes from 2022 through 2024, including 88 fatal, 9,361 involving injury, 538 involving a bicycle and 788 involving a pedestrian. That is 11.36 per cent of the statewide crash total of 405,245 and 8.10 per cent of the state’s 1,087 fatal crashes, giving the corridor 1.91 fatal crashes per 1,000 against a statewide 2.68, but 11.68 bicycle crashes per 1,000 against 10.75 and 17.11 pedestrian crashes per 1,000 against 14.76. The corridor spans five counties, so cases are heard in Norfolk, Middlesex, Worcester, Hampshire or Berkshire Superior Court depending on where the crash happened. This is general information and not legal advice. Call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS; the first telephone consultation is offered without charge.

Why 283 and 807 Are Both True

The gap between those two numbers is not a rounding difference, and it is worth explaining exactly how it was closed, so that anyone can audit the figure rather than take it on trust.

MassDOT records a road name as it was written on the crash report. Sometimes the officer or the system attaches the state route designation, producing an entry like “WORCESTER ST Rte 9 E”. Sometimes it does not, producing “WORCESTER ST Rte” for the same pavement.

In seven of the eight towns, the data file proves the identification by itself, because both versions appear in the same town’s list. Wellesley’s list contains “WORCESTER ST Rte” at 89 crashes and, three rows later, “WORCESTER ST Rte 9 W” at 24 and “WORCESTER ST Rte 9 E” at 22. Shrewsbury has “BOSTON TURNPIKE Rte” at 70 alongside “BOSTON TURNPIKE Rte 9 W” at 24 and “BOSTON TURNPIKE Rte 9 E” at 21. Hadley has “RUSSELL ST Rte” at 142 alongside “RUSSELL ST Rte 9 E” at 8 and “RUSSELL ST Rte 9 W” at 7. The untagged row and the tagged row are the same street in the same town. Northborough is the only one of the eight with just the tagged entry, at 7 crashes.

Counted strictly by the route number, the corridor produced 283 crashes in 2024. Counted by street name where the same town’s data proves the street carries Route 9, it produced 807. No road was added on geography alone.

The reason to publish both numbers rather than the bigger one is that the smaller one is what anyone querying the public dataset for “Route 9” will get. If you look yourself and find a third of what is described here, that is why.

Hadley Is the Number Worth Sitting With

Hadley ranks 119th of the 349 Massachusetts communities in the dataset for total crashes, with 983 across three years. That is a small town’s total. Yet Russell Street, its stretch of Route 9, recorded 142 crashes in 2024 alone, and 157 once the two numbered segments are added.

Put that next to the towns further east. Wellesley’s busiest crash location is 89 in 2024. Shrewsbury’s is 70. Southborough’s is 72. Westborough’s is 61. Framingham’s is 30. Hadley, ranked more than sixty places below Wellesley for total crashes, has a single street that outproduces all of them.

Russell Street is the commercial strip that carries Route 9 between the Coolidge Bridge and Amherst, and it is the retail spine for a stretch of the Connecticut River valley that includes a large student population. What the number describes is a road doing two jobs at once: a through route carrying regional traffic at speed, and a local access road with entrances every few hundred feet. That combination is what produces left turn and rear end collisions, and it produces them in volume regardless of how small the town’s population is.

The same shape shows up in Southborough and Westborough, two towns ranked 110th and 44th, whose Turnpike Road segments produced 89 and 128 crashes. In all three, a modest community carries a disproportionate crash load because a busy road passes through it.

The Fatality Pattern Runs Opposite to the Crash Counts

Corridor-wide, Route 9’s communities have a fatality rate below the state’s. Across all 26 towns from Brookline to Pittsfield, MassDOT recorded 88 fatal crashes out of 46,056, a rate of 1.91 per 1,000 against a statewide 2.68.

The average hides everything interesting. Ordered by fatal crashes per 1,000 rather than by crash count, the corridor looks like this at the two ends:

Community	County	Crashes 2022-2024	Fatal	Fatal per 1,000	Statewide crash rank
Williamsburg	Hampshire	75	2	26.7	292nd
East Brookfield	Worcester	140	3	21.4	272nd
Goshen	Hampshire	49	1	20.4	306th
Brookfield	Worcester	104	1	9.6	283rd
Spencer	Worcester	614	4	6.5	170th
Belchertown	Hampshire	530	3	5.7	185th
Pittsfield	Berkshire	2,809	9	3.2	34th
Hadley	Hampshire	983	3	3.1	119th
Worcester	Worcester	15,598	29	1.9	2nd
Newton	Middlesex	4,924	4	0.8	13th
Wellesley	Norfolk	1,931	1	0.5	54th
Natick	Middlesex	1,997	1	0.5	53rd
Westborough	Worcester	2,182	0	0.0	44th

The ordering is close to an inversion of the crash counts. The towns with the most crashes have the lowest share of fatal ones, and the rural towns in the middle and western sections, where the road is a two lane highway through open country, have the highest.

Two cautions belong with that table, and they are the same ones that apply on every corridor. First, these are small counts. Williamsburg’s 26.7 per 1,000 rests on two fatal crashes out of 75. A single collision moves a number like that enormously, and it should be read as a description of three particular years in one small town rather than as a fixed property of the place. Second, MassDOT crash records contain no traffic volume, so nothing here can separate a road that is more dangerous from a road that simply carries more vehicles.

What the pattern is consistent with, and what the same pattern on Route 24, in the Worcester County data and across Berkshire, Franklin and Hampshire counties also suggests, is a difference in speed and in the time it takes help to arrive, rather than a difference in how carefully anyone drives.

Bicycles and Pedestrians

This is where the corridor genuinely stands apart from the state as a whole, and it is the finding most relevant to the towns in the middle of the list.

Across the 26 communities, MassDOT recorded 538 crashes involving a bicycle and 788 involving a pedestrian over the three years. As rates, that is 11.68 bicycle crashes per 1,000 against a statewide 10.75, and 17.11 pedestrian crashes per 1,000 against a statewide 14.76. Both are above the state’s, while the fatality rate is below it and the injury share, at 20.3 per cent against 22.9 per cent, is below it too.

That combination describes a specific kind of road. Corridor crashes are somewhat less likely than average to be severe, and noticeably more likely than average to involve somebody who was not in a vehicle at all.

The concentrations are where you would expect. Worcester alone recorded 327 pedestrian crashes and 116 bicycle crashes; Newton 120 and 83; Framingham 79 and 70; Brookline 74 pedestrian crashes and 71 bicycle crashes on only 1,231 total crashes, which is the highest bicycle share in the corridor. Northampton recorded 33 and 30, and Amherst 28 and 15. These are the walkable town centres and the university towns, and Route 9 runs directly through several of them.

What that means for a claim is covered in the articles on pedestrian accident rights in Massachusetts and Massachusetts bicycle laws. The short version is that the law does not treat a person on foot or on a bicycle as a lesser road user, and that the questions which decide these cases are visibility, right of way and speed.

Five Counties, Five Courthouses

A single road, and a case that can end up in any of five different Superior Courts depending on which town the crash happened in.

Brookline and Wellesley sit in Norfolk County, and Norfolk Superior Court sits in Dedham. Newton, Natick and Framingham are Middlesex County, heard at Middlesex County Superior Court, 200 Tradecenter Drive, 2nd Floor, Woburn. Southborough, Westborough, Northborough, Shrewsbury, Worcester, Leicester, Spencer and the three Brookfields are Worcester County, heard at Worcester County Superior Court, 225 Main St., Worcester, a courthouse that sits on the corridor itself. Ware, Belchertown, Amherst, Hadley, Northampton, Williamsburg, Goshen and Cummington are Hampshire County, heard at Hampshire County Superior Court, 15 Gothic St., Northampton, also on the corridor. Windsor, Dalton and Pittsfield are Berkshire County, heard in Pittsfield.

Two crashes twenty minutes apart on the same road can be heard in different courthouses in different parts of the state. The substantive law is identical in all five. What changes is where the paperwork goes and how far anyone has to travel.

What These Numbers Do Not Tell You About Your Crash

A corridor’s crash history sets expectations. It does not decide a claim, and it is worth being precise about the difference.

It does not establish fault. Fault comes from the evidence of the particular collision: the crash report, the scene, the vehicle positions, the photographs, any video, and the accounts of the people involved. 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 share is greater than the combined share of those you claim against. That is set out in comparative negligence and partial fault and in how fault is determined.

It does not tell you what a claim is worth. That comes from the medical record, the wage loss and the insurance actually available, which is the subject of Massachusetts car accident case value.

It does not stop a clock. The general deadline for a tort claim in Massachusetts is three years under M.G.L. c. 260, sec. 2A, and shorter deadlines apply where a public body is involved. Those are covered in the statute of limitations article and in whether you can sue the state or a city.

And it does not include traffic volume, which is the single largest thing missing from every figure on this page.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Which Massachusetts town has the most Route 9 crashes?

A: Hadley, at 157 crashes in 2024 across the three Russell Street entries in its top-road list, per MassDOT crash records. Wellesley follows at 135 on Worcester Street, then Westborough at 128 on Turnpike Road, Natick at 122 on Worcester Street, Shrewsbury at 115 on Boston Turnpike, Southborough at 89 on Turnpike Road, Framingham at 54 on Worcester Road and Northborough at 7 on Belmont Street. Hadley is the striking case because it ranks only 119th of the state’s 349 communities for total crashes, yet Russell Street alone recorded 142 crashes in that single year.

Q: Why is Route 9 hard to find in Massachusetts crash data?

A: Because MassDOT records a road name as it was written on the crash report, and the route number is attached only some of the time. Of the 807 crashes on Route 9 segments in the eight towns’ 2024 lists, only 283 carry the number. The rest appear as Worcester Street, Worcester Road, Turnpike Road, Boston Turnpike, Belmont Street or Russell Street with no number. In seven of the eight towns you can prove the identification from the data alone, because the same street name appears twice in the same town’s list, once tagged with Route 9 and once not.

Q: Is Route 9 more dangerous than other Massachusetts roads?

A: The data does not support that framing and cannot really answer the question. Across the 26 communities the road passes through, MassDOT recorded 88 fatal crashes out of 46,056 from 2022 through 2024, a rate of 1.91 per 1,000 against a statewide 2.68, and the injury share of 20.3 per cent is below the statewide 22.9 per cent. Where the corridor does run above the state is in crashes involving people outside vehicles: 11.68 bicycle crashes per 1,000 against 10.75, and 17.11 pedestrian crashes per 1,000 against 14.76. More fundamentally, MassDOT crash records contain no traffic volume, so they cannot distinguish a road that is more dangerous from one that simply carries more vehicles.

Q: Which Route 9 community has the highest fatal crash rate?

A: Williamsburg, at 26.7 fatal crashes per 1,000 crashes across 2022 through 2024, on 2 fatal crashes out of 75 total. East Brookfield follows at 21.4 on 3 out of 140, and Goshen at 20.4 on 1 out of 49. All three are small rural towns in the western and central sections of the corridor, and all three rest on very small counts, so the ratios move a great deal on a single collision. At the other end, Westborough recorded no fatal crashes at all across the three years, and Wellesley and Natick recorded one each, at 0.5 per 1,000.

Q: What counties does Route 9 run through?

A: Five. Norfolk at the eastern end, through Brookline and Wellesley; Middlesex through Newton, Natick and Framingham; Worcester through Southborough, Westborough, Northborough, Shrewsbury, Worcester, Leicester, Spencer and the Brookfields; Hampshire through Ware, Belchertown, Amherst, Hadley, Northampton, Williamsburg, Goshen and Cummington; and Berkshire through Windsor, Dalton and Pittsfield. A case is heard in the Superior Court of the county where the crash happened, so two crashes a short distance apart on the same road can go to different courthouses. The law applied is the same in all five.

Q: Why does Boston not appear in the Route 9 totals?

A: Because including it would distort every rate on the page. The road’s eastern terminus is inside Boston, but Boston recorded 17,407 crashes across the three years, more than a third as many as the entire 26 town corridor, almost all of them nowhere near Route 9. Adding a city of that size for the sake of a short segment would describe Boston rather than the corridor, so no Boston figure is used in any total here. Boston’s own numbers are on its page in the Massachusetts crash report.

Q: Does a road’s crash history help my claim?

A: Not directly. Fault is decided by 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. A road’s history can matter as context, and it matters more where the claim is that the road itself was defective, since whether a public body had reasonable notice of a defect is written into those statutes. It is never a substitute for the crash report, the photographs and the medical records.

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. 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 Hadley, Wellesley, Westborough, Natick, Shrewsbury, Southborough, Framingham and Northborough town pages. Some of the smaller corridor towns, including Williamsburg, Goshen and the Brookfields, fall below the dataset’s threshold for a town page, so their totals appear here but not as pages of their own.

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 26 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

What corridor data is good for is setting expectations about the shape of the risk, and on Route 9 the shape is specific. It is a surface road doing a highway’s job for a hundred miles, it is the highest-crash road in most of the towns it passes through, its collisions are somewhat less likely than average to be severe and noticeably more likely than average to involve someone on foot or on a bicycle, and it crosses five counties, so two similar crashes can end up in different courthouses.

What the data cannot tell you is what any individual claim is worth or who was at fault. Those come from the crash report, the medical records, the photographs and the insurance policies actually in play.

The one thing worth acting on early is the calendar. The general deadline is three years under M.G.L. c. 260, sec. 2A, and it is shorter where a public body is part of the claim, which happens more often on a state numbered route than people expect.

Jim Glaser Law handles injury claims across the corridor communities, including Worcester, Framingham, Newton and Brookline. 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.