Which Massachusetts Towns Have the Most Washington Street Crashes?

Hanover. MassDOT’s 2024 crash records show 121 crashes on Washington Street in Hanover, spread across four separately recorded segments, which is more than any other Massachusetts community. Newton follows at 114 and Stoughton at 97, and Stoughton’s 97 is the largest figure recorded for a single continuous Washington Street segment anywhere in the state. Across Massachusetts as a whole, 41 Washington Street segments in 28 towns account for 1,293 crashes in 2024, which makes Washington Street the second highest entry on MassDOT’s statewide top-road list behind Main Street. The pattern underneath those totals is the part worth reading: 41.5 percent of every Washington Street crash in the state happened in Norfolk County, which accounts for only 10.3 percent of Massachusetts crashes overall, and the same test run on Main Street shows no such skew. Every figure below comes from MassDOT crash records and can be checked town by town in the Massachusetts crash report. To talk through a crash on any of these streets, call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS. The line is answered 24 hours a day, and the first telephone consultation is free.

Where Washington Street Sits Statewide

MassDOT publishes a top-road breakdown for the most recent complete year. For 2024 the leading entries, recorded exactly as the source records them, are Main Street at 2,672 crashes, Washington Street at 1,118, Pleasant Street at 633, and then the first highway, Interstate 93 northbound, at 444.

So the second busiest road name in Massachusetts is not a highway either. It is a street that runs through the middle of two dozen downtowns. The Main Street analysis sets out at length why that ordering says more about how many towns share a street name than about which pavement is most hazardous, and the same caution applies here in full.

The statewide entry of 1,118 counts only the exact spelling “Washington St”. The town-by-town figures in this article use a slightly wider rule, taking any entry whose recorded name begins with Washington Street or a directional version of it, which is how North Washington Street in North Attleborough and Washington Street eastbound in Somerville both get counted. That rule returns 41 segments in 28 towns and 1,293 crashes, or 0.95 percent of the 135,447 crashes recorded statewide in 2024.

The Twenty-Eight Towns

The middle column is the number of crashes MassDOT records on all of that town’s highest-crash roads in 2024, so the share tells you how much of a town’s recorded road crash load sits on one street.

Town	Washington St crashes, 2024	All recorded road crashes	Share	Segments	County
Hanover	121	173	69.9%	4	Plymouth
Newton	114	200	57.0%	2	Middlesex
Stoughton	97	284	34.2%	1	Norfolk
Wellesley	82	262	31.3%	3	Norfolk
Easton	74	285	26.0%	1	Bristol
North Attleborough	71	104	68.3%	3	Bristol
Canton	70	170	41.2%	1	Norfolk
Weymouth	68	386	17.6%	1	Norfolk
Auburn	66	267	24.7%	2	Worcester
Woburn	58	352	16.5%	1	Middlesex
Gloucester	56	198	28.3%	1	Essex
Braintree	52	205	25.4%	1	Norfolk
Attleboro	47	98	48.0%	2	Bristol
Haverhill	38	128	29.7%	2	Essex
Hudson	38	143	26.6%	1	Middlesex
Foxborough	32	136	23.5%	1	Norfolk
Peabody	30	320	9.4%	1	Essex
Quincy	27	275	9.8%	1	Norfolk
Wrentham	27	52	51.9%	3	Norfolk
Walpole	25	219	11.4%	1	Norfolk
Norwood	24	123	19.5%	1	Norfolk
Dedham	19	156	12.2%	1	Norfolk
Abington	13	126	10.3%	1	Plymouth
Pembroke	12	91	13.2%	1	Plymouth
East Bridgewater	11	160	6.9%	1	Plymouth
Brookline	9	52	17.3%	1	Norfolk
Somerville	7	60	11.7%	1	Middlesex
Franklin	5	62	8.1%	1	Norfolk

Hanover is the number that stops you. Seven of every ten crashes MassDOT itemizes on Hanover’s highest-crash roads happened on Washington Street, which in Hanover carries Route 53. North Attleborough is close behind at 68.3 percent across its North, South and East Washington Street segments, and Newton at 57.0 percent across the eastbound and westbound halves it records separately.

Answer Capsule

Washington Street is the second most crash-heavy road name in Massachusetts. In 2024 MassDOT recorded 1,293 crashes on 41 Washington Street segments across 28 towns. Hanover has the highest town total at 121, then Newton at 114 and Stoughton at 97, and Stoughton’s is the largest single segment figure in the state. Norfolk County holds 537 of the 1,293, or 41.5 percent, against 10.3 percent of all Massachusetts crashes, and a control test on Main Street shows no comparable Norfolk skew. These are counts of recorded collisions with no traffic-volume denominator, so they identify where crashes cluster and cannot establish that any road is the most dangerous or that any driver was at fault.

The Finding: One County Holds Four in Ten

Group the 1,293 crashes by county and the distribution is lopsided.

County	Washington St crashes, 2024	Share
Norfolk	537	41.5%
Middlesex	217	16.8%
Bristol	192	14.8%
Plymouth	157	12.1%
Essex	124	9.6%
Worcester	66	5.1%

Thirteen Norfolk County towns appear in this dataset: Stoughton, Wellesley, Canton, Weymouth, Braintree, Foxborough, Quincy, Wrentham, Walpole, Norwood, Dedham, Brookline and Franklin. Between them they carry 537 of the 1,293, which is nearly two and a half times the total for Middlesex County, the next county on the list, from thirteen towns against Middlesex’s four.

That is a large claim, so it was tested twice before it was written down.

The first objection is that this could be an artifact of which towns get road-level detail at all. MassDOT itemizes named roads only for communities clearing a crash threshold, 144 of the 349 in the state, and if Norfolk happened to be over-represented among those 144 the concentration would mean nothing. It is not. Across all 144 of those towns MassDOT records 26,771 crashes on named roads in 2024, and Norfolk accounts for 3,598 of them, or 13.4 percent, which sits close to its 10.3 percent share of all Massachusetts crashes from 2022 through 2024. Norfolk is not unusually visible in this dataset. It is 3.1 times more present on Washington Street than its road-level baseline predicts.

The second objection is stronger and it needs a control. If something about Norfolk County reporting inflated street counts generally, the same skew would show up on the state’s other great shared street name. Run the identical selection rule on Main Street for 2024 and the answer is that it does not. Main Street returns 3,550 crashes across 75 towns, of which Norfolk holds 430, or 12.1 percent, sitting almost exactly on its 13.4 percent baseline. Worcester County leads Main Street at 28.3 percent and holds just 5.1 percent of Washington Street. The two names sort Massachusetts in opposite directions, which is the reason to believe the Washington Street pattern is about the road rather than about the recordkeeping.

Why One Street Name Behaves Like One Road

Main Street is a naming convention. Nearly every New England town has one, and they are unrelated to each other. Washington Street in eastern Massachusetts is different in a way the crash data makes visible: a large share of its heaviest segments are not local streets at all but numbered state routes that happen to keep the old name where they pass through a town center.

The source data carries the route number on some segments and not others, and only the recorded ones are stated here. Hanover’s Washington Street is recorded as Route 53, in both directions plus an unnumbered stretch. Attleboro’s is Route 1, northbound and southbound. Wrentham’s is US Route 1. Wellesley’s carries Route 16. Auburn’s carries Route 20, which the Route 20 corridor analysis covers in its own right. For the remaining towns the source records the name without a number, so no route designation is claimed for them here.

That is enough to explain the shape of the table. A numbered state route funnels regional traffic at highway-feeder speeds into a street lined with driveways, crosswalks, on-street parking and signalized intersections. The result is a high count of low-severity collisions in exactly the places where a town’s own residents are walking. The Route 1 analysis and the Norfolk County crash data both document the same mechanism on a larger scale, and the Norfolk piece adds the detail that the county’s fatal-crash ratio varies by more than a factor of two between its coastal and inland halves.

The South Shore towns in this table, Hanover, Weymouth, Braintree, Abington, Pembroke and East Bridgewater, sit inside the region covered by the South Shore crash data. Easton, Attleboro and North Attleborough are in the Bristol County set, Newton, Woburn, Hudson and Somerville in Middlesex, and Gloucester, Haverhill and Peabody in Essex.

What These Numbers Do Not Say

Four limits, stated here rather than left for someone else to find.

There is no exposure denominator. This dataset carries no traffic volume and no street mileage, so a street with more crashes may simply carry more vehicles for more miles. Nothing here supports calling any road the most dangerous in Massachusetts, and this article does not.

The road-level counts are 2024 only, while the town totals and fatality counts elsewhere on this site cover 2022 through 2024. Road naming in the source shifts enough between years that stacking three years of it produces noise. Where a three-year figure is quoted above, it is labelled as such.

Coverage is partial in two ways at once. MassDOT itemizes named roads only for the 144 communities clearing its threshold, so a Washington Street in any of the other 205 towns is invisible here. And within a covered town only the highest-crash roads are itemized, which is why the 19 towns listing the exact spelling sum to 814 against a statewide entry of 1,118. The missing 304 crashes, 27.2 percent of the total, happened on Washington Streets that ranked ninth or lower in their own town. Boston is the clearest illustration: its Washington Street does not appear anywhere in this article, because the eight roads MassDOT itemizes for Boston are the two directions of Interstate 93, Storrow Drive, both directions of the Massachusetts Turnpike, Morrissey Boulevard, Soldiers Field Road and the Tobin Bridge, and the smallest of those recorded 29 crashes.

One entry was excluded on purpose. North Attleborough has a record named for a ramp from Route 295 northbound to Route 1 southbound that carries South Washington Street in its name, with 8 crashes. It is a ramp and not a street segment, so it is out of the 1,293. Including it would give 42 entries and 1,301.

Finally, and most importantly, a crash history does not establish fault. Responsibility for a particular collision is decided from the evidence in that collision. What a street’s record is genuinely useful for is practical: it tells you which corridors have signal timing studies, prior complaint records, sight-line surveys and maintenance histories worth requesting early, and it tells you which courthouse a case will be in.

What Actually Matters After a Crash on a Street Like This

Massachusetts law does not change because a street is busy. The rules below apply the same on Washington Street in Hanover as anywhere else, and each is covered in full in its own article.

Report it. Under M.G.L. c. 90, sec. 26, an operator involved in a crash in which anyone is injured or killed, or in which any one vehicle or other property takes more than $1,000 in damage, must report in writing to the Registrar within five days and send a copy to the police department with jurisdiction where it happened. More detail is in the guide to reporting a Massachusetts car accident.

Know the deadline. M.G.L. c. 260, sec. 2A gives three years from the date the cause of action accrues for actions of tort. Claims against a public body run on a different clock, which is the next point. See the Massachusetts personal injury statute of limitations.

Partial fault does not end a claim. Under M.G.L. c. 231, sec. 85, contributory negligence bars recovery only if the injured person’s share of negligence is greater than the total attributable to the parties they are claiming against, and otherwise damages are simply reduced in proportion. The same section abolishes the defense of assumption of risk and provides that the plaintiff is presumed to have been in the exercise of due care. The mechanics are set out in comparative negligence in Massachusetts.

There is a threshold for pain and suffering in motor vehicle cases. M.G.L. c. 231, sec. 6D allows those damages only where reasonable and necessary medical expenses exceed $2,000, unless the injury caused death, consisted in whole or in part of loss of a body member or of permanent and serious disfigurement, produced the loss of sight or hearing the statute describes, or consisted of a fracture. That is explained in the serious injury threshold, and the first payer of medical bills is usually the injured person’s own policy, covered in personal injury protection.

If the road itself is the problem, the rules are unusually strict and unusually short. A claim that a defect or want of repair in a public way caused the injury runs under M.G.L. c. 84, sec. 15, against whichever county, city, town or other body is by law obliged to repair that stretch. Which body that is varies segment by segment on a numbered route, and this article does not guess at it. Two features of chapter 84 catch people out. Section 18 requires written notice of the name and residence of the injured person and the time, place and cause of the injury within thirty days, served under section 19 on a selectman, town clerk or treasurer for a town, or the mayor, city clerk or treasurer for a city, with suit brought within three years. And section 15 caps recovery against a county, city, town or local water and sewer commission at one fifth of one percent of its state valuation and in no case more than five thousand dollars. Separately, a claim against a public employer under the Tort Claims Act requires written presentment to that employer’s executive officer within two years under M.G.L. c. 258, sec. 4, with no action brought more than three years after the cause of action accrued. Both routes are covered in suing a government entity in Massachusetts.

How fault gets proven in the ordinary case, where another driver rather than the road is the issue, is covered in how fault is determined after a Massachusetts car accident.

Checking Your Own Town

Every town in the table above has its own page in the crash report, with the full three-year totals, the fatal, injury, bicycle and pedestrian counts, the town’s rank among all 349 Massachusetts communities, and its highest-crash roads by name: Hanover, Newton, Stoughton, Wellesley, North Attleborough, Canton, Auburn, Gloucester, Attleboro and Braintree. The full index of all towns is at the Massachusetts crash report.

For the towns in this table that also have a car accident page on this site, the local pages are Newton, Quincy, Weymouth, Brookline, Somerville, Haverhill and Peabody.

To talk through a crash on Washington Street or anywhere else in Massachusetts, call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS. The line is answered 24 hours a day, and the first telephone consultation is free.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Which Massachusetts town has the most Washington Street crashes?

A: Hanover, with 121 crashes recorded on Washington Street in 2024 across four separately recorded segments. Newton is second at 114 across its eastbound and westbound halves, and Stoughton third at 97, which is the largest figure recorded for a single continuous Washington Street segment anywhere in Massachusetts. All three come from MassDOT crash records for calendar year 2024.

Q: How many crashes happen on Washington Street in Massachusetts?

A: MassDOT recorded 1,293 crashes on 41 Washington Street segments across 28 Massachusetts towns in 2024, which is 0.95 percent of the 135,447 crashes recorded statewide that year. Counting only the exact spelling used in the statewide top-road list, Washington Street is second at 1,118, behind Main Street at 2,672 and ahead of Pleasant Street at 633.

Q: Is Washington Street the most dangerous road in Massachusetts?

A: The data does not support that and this article does not say it. These are counts of recorded collisions with no traffic-volume or mileage denominator, so a street with more crashes may simply carry more traffic. What the counts show is where collisions cluster, which is useful for knowing what records to request about a particular stretch of road, and not a ranking of danger.

Q: Why are so many Washington Street crashes in Norfolk County?

A: Norfolk County holds 537 of the 1,293, or 41.5 percent, against 10.3 percent of all Massachusetts crashes from 2022 through 2024 and 13.4 percent of every crash MassDOT itemizes on a named road anywhere in 2024. The likeliest explanation, and it is inference rather than a finding, is that Washington Street through much of eastern Massachusetts is a numbered state route running through town centers, carrying regional traffic at feeder speeds past driveways, crosswalks and signalized intersections. The pattern is specific to this street name: the same test on Main Street puts Norfolk at 12.1 percent, sitting on its baseline, while Worcester County leads Main Street at 28.3 percent and holds only 5.1 percent of Washington Street.

Q: Which Washington Streets are numbered state routes?

A: The source data records a route number on some segments and not others, and only the recorded ones are stated here. Hanover’s Washington Street is recorded as Route 53, Attleboro’s as Route 1, Wrentham’s as US Route 1, Wellesley’s as Route 16, and Auburn’s as Route 20. For the other towns in the table the source records the street name without a route number, so no designation is claimed for them.

Q: Why does Boston not appear in this article?

A: Because MassDOT itemizes only a limited number of the highest-crash roads for each community, and Boston’s Washington Street is not among the eight it records for Boston. Those eight are Interstate 93 in both directions, Storrow Drive, the Massachusetts Turnpike in both directions, Morrissey Boulevard, Soldiers Field Road and the Tobin Bridge, and the smallest of them recorded 29 crashes in 2024. The same cut hides Washington Street crashes in other towns too: 19 towns list the exact spelling in their own top roads and sum to 814, against a statewide figure of 1,118, so 304 crashes sit in towns where the street ranked ninth or lower.

Q: Does a street’s crash record help prove fault in my case?

A: Not directly. Fault is decided from the evidence of the specific collision, and a road’s history does not establish that any particular driver was careless. Where the record helps is practical. It identifies corridors where signal timing studies, prior complaint records, sight-line surveys and maintenance histories are worth requesting early, and it tells you which county the case will be heard in.

Q: What if a defect in the road caused the crash rather than another driver?

A: Massachusetts treats that as a different kind of claim with much shorter deadlines. Under M.G.L. c. 84, sec. 15, a claim for injury caused by a defect or want of repair in a public way lies against whichever body is by law obliged to repair that stretch, and which body that is varies from segment to segment on a numbered route. Section 18 requires written notice within thirty days giving the injured person’s name and residence and the time, place and cause of the injury, served under section 19 on a town selectman, clerk or treasurer or a city’s mayor, clerk or treasurer, with suit within three years. Section 15 also caps recovery against a county, city, town or local water and sewer commission at one fifth of one percent of its state valuation and in no case more than five thousand dollars. A claim against a public employer under the Tort Claims Act instead requires written presentment within two years under M.G.L. c. 258, sec. 4, with no action more than three years after the cause of action accrued.

Q: Where does this data come from?

A: MassDOT’s open crash data, the record built from Massachusetts crash reports, covering calendar years 2022 through 2024, including the fatal-crash counts. The road-level counts used throughout this article are for 2024, the most recent complete year in the dataset. County groupings follow the town rosters published in this site’s county crash reports. The underlying data is refreshed on this site monthly, and the per-town figures are published at /crash-report so any number in this article can be checked against its source.

Q: Is Jimmy Knows AI giving me legal advice?

A: No. This is general information about Massachusetts law and public crash data, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Crash statistics describe where collisions happened; they do not determine responsibility for any particular collision, which is decided from the evidence in that case. For advice about a specific matter, speak with a Massachusetts attorney. The Jim Glaser Law line is answered 24 hours a day at (617) JIM-WINS, and the first telephone consultation is free.