Which Massachusetts South Shore Towns Have the Highest Crash Death Rates?

Duxbury, and it is not close. Across 2022, 2023 and 2024, MassDOT recorded 697 crashes in Duxbury and five of them were fatal, a rate of 7.17 fatal crashes per 1,000, against a Massachusetts figure of 2.68. Hanson is second at 6.41, then Hingham at 5.67, Marshfield at 5.48 and Kingston at 5.14. Every one of those five is at least double the state rate, and every one of them is a small town that records a fraction of the crashes its neighbours do. The city with by far the most crashes on the South Shore, Quincy, has the region’s lowest fatality rate at 1.08 per 1,000. That inversion is the whole story of this region, and it is invisible in any figure that reports the South Shore as a single number. If you were hurt in a crash anywhere on the South Shore, the Jim Glaser Law line at (617) JIM-WINS is answered 24 hours a day, and the first telephone consultation is offered without charge.

The Nineteen Communities, and Why the Region Is Not a County

“South Shore” is a regional convention rather than a line on an administrative map, so the honest thing to do is name what is being counted.

This article counts nineteen communities running from the Boston line to Plymouth: Quincy, Milton, Braintree, Weymouth, Hingham, Hull, Cohasset, Scituate, Norwell, Hanover, Rockland, Abington, Whitman, Hanson, Pembroke, Marshfield, Duxbury, Kingston and Plymouth.

That set crosses a county line, which is exactly why it is worth counting separately. Quincy, Milton, Braintree, Weymouth and Cohasset sit in Norfolk County; the other fourteen sit in Plymouth County. Neither county piece describes this strip, because both counties reach a long way inland into towns with entirely different road types. The Norfolk County crash data and Plymouth County crash data articles cover those administrative units. This one covers the coast.

Two communities were tested and left out: Randolph and Holbrook, which some definitions include. Adding them moves the region’s fatal rate from 2.82 per 1,000 to 2.68 per 1,000, which is the statewide figure exactly. That sensitivity is itself a reason not to lead with the regional rate, and it is dealt with directly below.

All figures come from MassDOT crash records for 2022 through 2024, the same dataset behind every town page in the Massachusetts crash report.

This Is Not the Same Set of Towns as Plymouth County

That distinction is worth making explicitly, because the two are often used as though they were the same thing and the numbers come out differently.

Fourteen of the nineteen communities here are also in Plymouth County: Abington, Duxbury, Hanover, Hanson, Hingham, Hull, Kingston, Marshfield, Norwell, Pembroke, Plymouth, Rockland, Scituate and Whitman.

Five are not, and they are the ones that change the answer: Quincy, Milton, Braintree, Weymouth and Cohasset, all in Norfolk County. Between them those five recorded 14,831 crashes, 53 per cent of everything counted on this page.

Thirteen Plymouth County communities are excluded here because they are inland or south of the coastal strip: Brockton, Bridgewater, East Bridgewater, West Bridgewater, Carver, Halifax, Lakeville, Marion, Mattapoisett, Middleborough, Plympton, Rochester and Wareham.

The consequence is that the two pages answer different questions and give different numbers. Plymouth County as an administrative unit runs 3.64 fatal crashes per 1,000, and the Plymouth County crash data page shows that removing Brockton pushes the remaining twenty-six communities to 3.92. This coastal strip runs 2.82 including Quincy and 3.34 without it. Neither is wrong. They are different towns.

The Regional Number Is Not Worth Much, and Here Is Why

Taken together, the nineteen communities recorded 28,028 crashes over the three years, including 79 fatal crashes, 6,984 crashes involving injury, 261 involving a bicycle and 352 involving a pedestrian. That is 6.92 per cent of every crash in Massachusetts.

Run the fatality rate on that and you get 2.82 fatal crashes per 1,000 against a statewide 2.68. Five per cent above the state. A page that wanted a headline could stop there and say the South Shore is more dangerous than Massachusetts as a whole, and the sentence would be technically defensible and functionally useless.

The reason it is useless is Quincy. Quincy recorded 6,455 crashes, 23 per cent of the region’s entire total, and only 7 of them were fatal. That is 1.08 per 1,000, the lowest rate of any of the nineteen. A single dense city with a great many low-speed collisions is doing most of the work in the denominator and almost none in the numerator.

Take Quincy out and the remaining eighteen communities recorded 21,573 crashes and 72 fatal ones. That is 3.34 fatal crashes per 1,000, one and a quarter times the state figure rather than five per cent above it.

That is the opposite of what usually happens in this dataset. Along Route 1 and across the western counties, a big city was what inflated a regional fatality figure. On the South Shore the big city is what suppresses it.

Answer Capsule

Duxbury has the highest crash fatality rate on the Massachusetts South Shore, at 7.17 fatal crashes per 1,000 (5 fatal crashes out of 697) across 2022 to 2024, against a statewide 2.68. Hanson follows at 6.41, Hingham at 5.67, Marshfield at 5.48 and Kingston at 5.14, all at least double the state rate. The pattern is geographic: the fatality rate rises as you move away from Boston and toward the coast and the rural south, and the region’s densest city, Quincy, has its lowest rate at 1.08 per 1,000. Across all nineteen South Shore communities there were 28,028 crashes, 79 fatal, and 6,984 involving injury. The one measure that is elevated everywhere in the region regardless of how the towns are grouped is the injury share: 24.92 per cent of South Shore crashes involved injury against 22.89 per cent statewide, and removing Quincy raises it to 26.31 per cent. Bicycle and pedestrian involvement are both below the state rate. Every figure is from MassDOT crash records for 2022 through 2024.

The One Number That Holds Up However You Slice It

Fatality rates are volatile because fatal crashes are rare. Five deaths in Duxbury over three years is a real and terrible number, but it is five events, and a town with five could have had three or eight.

The injury share does not have that problem, because it is built on thousands of events rather than dozens. Across the nineteen communities, 6,984 of 28,028 crashes involved an injury. That is 24.92 per cent against a statewide 22.89 per cent.

Now apply the same test that broke the fatality figure. Remove Quincy and the injury share goes UP, to 26.31 per cent. It moves in the same direction under both cuts, which is what a real regional effect looks like as opposed to a composition artifact.

Put plainly: a crash on the South Shore is meaningfully more likely to hurt somebody than the average Massachusetts crash, and that is true across the region rather than in a few towns.

What the Region Is Not

A page that only reported the bad numbers would be easy to dismantle, so here are the two measures where the South Shore is safer than Massachusetts as a whole.

Bicycle involvement: 261 of 28,028 crashes, or 9.31 per 1,000, against a statewide 10.75. Without Quincy it falls further, to 8.81.

Pedestrian involvement: 352 crashes, or 12.56 per 1,000, against a statewide 14.76. Without Quincy it drops to 9.13, well under two thirds of the state figure.

That matters for what kind of problem this is. Regions with elevated bicycle and pedestrian numbers, Cambridge and Somerville being the clearest examples in Massachusetts, have a vulnerable-road-user problem concentrated at intersections and in dense street grids. The South Shore does not look like that. It looks like a region where crashes happen between vehicles, at higher speeds, on roads with fewer people walking near them, which is exactly the pattern that produces a high injury share and a high fatality rate outside the one dense city.

The Nineteen Communities, by Crash Volume

Every figure below is the three-year total for 2022 through 2024.

Community	Crashes	Fatal	Injury	Fatal per 1,000
Quincy	6,455	7	1,308	1.08
Weymouth	3,384	5	860	1.48
Plymouth	2,735	8	786	2.93
Braintree	2,536	9	759	3.55
Milton	2,135	8	715	3.75
Abington	1,414	7	419	4.95
Hingham	1,235	7	228	5.67
Hanover	1,198	2	280	1.67
Marshfield	913	5	201	5.48
Pembroke	843	2	219	2.37
Rockland	809	1	255	1.24
Kingston	778	4	197	5.14
Duxbury	697	5	163	7.17
Whitman	626	0	124	0.00
Norwell	614	2	164	3.26
Hanson	468	3	90	6.41
Scituate	462	2	90	4.33
Hull	405	2	70	4.94
Cohasset	321	0	56	0.00

Two communities recorded no fatal crash at all in the three years, Whitman and Cohasset. Ranking them as the safest would be reading more into a zero than a zero can carry, and the same caution applies in the other direction to the small towns at the top.

The Gradient Runs Away From Boston

Sort that table by fatality rate rather than by volume and the geography is hard to miss.

The four lowest rates in the region belong to Quincy (1.08), Rockland (1.24), Weymouth (1.48) and Hanover (1.67). Quincy and Weymouth are the two communities closest to Boston with the densest street networks.

The five highest belong to Duxbury (7.17), Hanson (6.41), Hingham (5.67), Marshfield (5.48) and Kingston (5.14). Four of those five sit at the outer coastal end of the region, and Hanson sits inland in its rural southwest corner.

The mechanism is not mysterious and it is the same one that shows up in the western Massachusetts numbers. Dense places produce a great many low-speed crashes, which raises the denominator without raising the numerator much. Open roads produce fewer crashes at higher speeds, and speed is what turns a crash into a fatal one. A town can be genuinely more dangerous to drive through and still record a small absolute number of collisions.

The Roads the Data Names

The dataset records each community’s highest-crash roads. Eight of the nineteen communities fall below the reporting threshold used for the crash report town pages, and five of those have no road entries at all in the file, so no road is named for Duxbury, Hanson, Kingston, Scituate or Hull here. Inventing one would be worse than the gap.

For the eleven communities that do carry road data, these are the highest-crash roads recorded in the most recent year of the file:

• Weymouth: Main Street, 134 crashes, the single highest road total anywhere in the region. Then Washington Street at 68, Middle Street at 44 and Pleasant Street at 43.
• Quincy: Hancock Street, split by direction, 65 northbound and 57 southbound. Then the Southern Artery, 32 southbound and 29 northbound.
• Plymouth: State Road at 58, Long Pond Road at 36, Samoset Street at 34 and Court Street at 28.
• Braintree: Washington Street at 52, Granite Street at 40, and Interstate 93 northbound at 27.
• Milton: Blue Hill Avenue at 38, Canton Avenue at 25, and the Yankee Division Highway carriageway of Interstate 93 northbound at 25.
• Marshfield: Ocean Street at 38 and Plain Street at 28.
• Abington: Bedford Street, carrying Route 18, at 33 southbound and 23 northbound.
• Hingham: Main Street at 28, Derby Street at 21 and Lincoln Street at 17.

Two things stand out. Weymouth’s Main Street total is more than twice the busiest road in any other South Shore community, and Weymouth’s fatality rate is nonetheless the third lowest in the region, which is the volume-against-severity split again in a single town. And Interstate 93 appears in both Braintree and Milton, the two communities where the region meets the expressway network described in the Interstate 93 crash data.

Where to Look Up a Specific Town

Eleven of the nineteen communities have a full page in the crash report with their statewide rank on every measure and their own road list: Quincy, Weymouth, Plymouth, Braintree, Milton, Abington, Hingham, Hanover, Marshfield, Pembroke and Rockland.

The other eight fall below the volume threshold used for those pages, which is why their numbers appear in the table above rather than on a page of their own.

Three South Shore communities also have local practice-area pages: Quincy car accident information, Weymouth car accident information and Plymouth car accident information.

What These Numbers Establish, and What They Do Not

Crash counts describe where collisions happened. They do not decide who was responsible for any one of them, and no rate on this page has any bearing on a particular claim.

They also do not measure risk per mile driven or per resident. A town with a low crash count may simply have fewer cars on it. Everything here is a share of crashes, not a share of trips, and the fatality figures in particular rest on small numbers of events.

What they do establish is a pattern worth knowing if you drive this part of Massachusetts: the crashes that happen out toward Duxbury, Marshfield, Kingston and Hanson are far more likely to kill somebody than the crashes that happen in Quincy, and the region as a whole produces injuries at a higher share than Massachusetts does. If a South Shore crash injured you, the questions that decide a claim are how fault is determined, whether the injury clears the Massachusetts tort threshold, and the deadline for filing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Which South Shore town in Massachusetts has the most car crashes?

A: Quincy, by a wide margin. MassDOT recorded 6,455 crashes there across 2022 to 2024, which is 23 per cent of every crash in the nineteen communities counted here. Weymouth is second at 3,384 and Plymouth third at 2,735. Volume and danger are different things: Quincy also has the lowest fatal crash rate in the region at 1.08 per 1,000.

Q: Which South Shore town has the highest crash fatality rate?

A: Duxbury, at 7.17 fatal crashes per 1,000 crashes, from 5 fatal crashes out of 697 total over the three years. The statewide rate is 2.68. Hanson (6.41), Hingham (5.67), Marshfield (5.48) and Kingston (5.14) follow. These rest on small numbers of fatal crashes, so they describe a pattern rather than a precise ranking.

Q: Is the South Shore more dangerous than the rest of Massachusetts?

A: On two measures yes and on two measures no. The injury share is higher, 24.92 per cent of crashes against 22.89 per cent statewide, and it rises to 26.31 per cent if Quincy is excluded. The fatality rate for the region excluding Quincy is 3.34 per 1,000 against 2.68 statewide. But bicycle involvement (9.31 per 1,000 against 10.75) and pedestrian involvement (12.56 against 14.76) are both below the state figures.

Q: Which road on the South Shore has the most crashes?

A: Main Street in Weymouth, with 134 crashes in the most recent year in the dataset, more than twice the busiest road recorded in any other South Shore community. Hancock Street in Quincy follows, with 65 crashes northbound and 57 southbound.

Q: Why is Quincy treated separately in this article?

A: Because it distorts every regional average. Quincy carries 23 per cent of the region’s crashes and has its lowest fatality rate, so any single number for the South Shore is mostly a number about Quincy. Including it, the region runs 2.82 fatal crashes per 1,000; excluding it, 3.34. Reporting only the first would hide the pattern in the other eighteen communities.

Q: Which towns count as the South Shore?

A: There is no official boundary. This article counts nineteen communities from the Boston line to Plymouth: Quincy, Milton, Braintree, Weymouth, Hingham, Hull, Cohasset, Scituate, Norwell, Hanover, Rockland, Abington, Whitman, Hanson, Pembroke, Marshfield, Duxbury, Kingston and Plymouth. Randolph and Holbrook are sometimes included; adding them moves the regional fatality rate to exactly the statewide figure, which is noted above.

Q: Where do these numbers come from?

A: MassDOT crash records covering calendar years 2022, 2023 and 2024 for all 349 Massachusetts communities, the same dataset behind every town page in the crash report. Rates are calculated as fatal or bicycle or pedestrian crashes per 1,000 total crashes, and the statewide baselines are 2.68 fatal per 1,000, 22.89 per cent injury, 10.75 bicycle per 1,000 and 14.76 pedestrian per 1,000.

Q: Does a high crash rate in my town help my injury claim?

A: No. Fault in a Massachusetts crash is decided on the facts of the specific collision, not on the record of the road or the town. Town-level data is useful for understanding where and how crashes happen, and it has no evidentiary role in an individual claim.

Q: Is Jimmy Knows AI giving me legal advice?

A: No. This is general legal and public-safety information about Massachusetts crash data, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. For a specific crash, speak with a Massachusetts lawyer about your own facts.