How Dangerous Are Western Massachusetts Roads? Berkshire, Franklin and Hampshire County Crash Data

Across the seventy-eight cities and towns of Berkshire, Franklin and Hampshire counties, Massachusetts recorded 19,155 crashes from 2022 through 2024, including 82 fatal crashes, 3,896 crashes involving injury, 188 involving a bicycle and 235 involving a pedestrian. That is 4.73 per cent of every crash in the Commonwealth, but 7.54 per cent of every fatal one. Put as a rate, the three western counties produced 4.28 fatal crashes per 1,000 crashes against a statewide figure of 2.68, which is about one and six tenths times the state. And the region is below the state average on everything else: 20.3 per cent of its crashes involved injury against 22.9 per cent statewide, 9.81 per 1,000 involved a bicycle against 10.75, and 12.27 per 1,000 involved a pedestrian against 14.76. Fewer crashes, fewer people hurt as a share of them, fewer cyclists and pedestrians struck, and yet a death rate more than half again the state’s. Inside the region the effect concentrates hard by town size: the fifty-nine communities with fewer than 300 crashes over the three years hold 21.5 per cent of the region’s crashes and 45.1 per cent of its fatal crashes. 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 Seventy-Eight Communities, and Where the Numbers Come From

Berkshire County covers thirty-two cities and towns: Adams, Alford, Becket, Cheshire, Clarksburg, Dalton, Egremont, Florida, Great Barrington, Hancock, Hinsdale, Lanesborough, Lee, Lenox, Monterey, Mount Washington, New Ashford, New Marlborough, North Adams, Otis, Peru, Pittsfield, Richmond, Sandisfield, Savoy, Sheffield, Stockbridge, Tyringham, Washington, West Stockbridge, Williamstown and Windsor.

Franklin County covers twenty-six: Ashfield, Bernardston, Buckland, Charlemont, Colrain, Conway, Deerfield, Erving, Gill, Greenfield, Hawley, Heath, Leverett, Leyden, Monroe, Montague, New Salem, Northfield, Orange, Rowe, Shelburne, Shutesbury, Sunderland, Warwick, Wendell and Whately.

Hampshire County covers twenty: Amherst, Belchertown, Chesterfield, Cummington, Easthampton, Goshen, Granby, Hadley, Hatfield, Huntington, Middlefield, Northampton, Pelham, Plainfield, South Hadley, Southampton, Ware, Westhampton, Williamsburg and Worthington.

Seventy-seven of those seventy-eight appear in the crash dataset. Egremont, in southern Berkshire, falls below the threshold at which the source publishes a community, so it contributes nothing to any figure here and is not silently folded into one.

The crash counts come from MassDOT’s open crash data, the record assembled from Massachusetts crash reports, covering calendar years 2022, 2023 and 2024. The fatal-crash counts come from those same MassDOT records rather than from any federal dataset. The road-level counts further down are for 2024 alone, the most recent complete year in the data, 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 crashes, 92,759 crashes involving injury, 4,356 involving a bicycle and 5,980 involving a pedestrian.

One limitation belongs at the top rather than in a footnote. 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 tell you the rate per mile driven. Everything on this page is crash-to-crash: how a community’s crashes compare with other communities’ crashes. No population figures and no per-capita rates are used, because none could be verified against a primary source while this was written.

County by County

County	Crashes	Fatal	Injury	Bicycle	Pedestrian	Fatal per 1,000
Berkshire	8,151	31	1,626	76	102	3.80
Franklin	3,446	20	759	34	38	5.80
Hampshire	7,558	31	1,511	78	95	4.10
Three counties	19,155	82	3,896	188	235	4.28
Massachusetts	405,245	1,087	92,759	4,356	5,980	2.68

Franklin County is the striking line. Twenty fatal crashes out of 3,446 is 5.80 per 1,000, roughly two and a sixth times the statewide rate, and the highest of any county cut published on this site so far. Franklin is also the smallest of the three by crash volume, with fewer crashes across all twenty-six of its municipalities than Pittsfield and Northampton record between them.

Berkshire and Hampshire land at 3.80 and 4.10 per 1,000. Both are meaningfully above the state and well below Franklin.

The injury share runs the other way in all three. Berkshire at 19.9 per cent, Hampshire at 20.0 per cent and Franklin at 22.0 per cent all sit at or under the statewide 22.9 per cent. A smaller proportion of western crashes are recorded as involving injury, and a larger proportion of them are recorded as fatal. That is the shape of a region where the crashes that do happen at speed happen with less between the vehicles and whatever they hit, and where fewer of the low-speed urban fender benders that make up the bulk of the statewide count are occurring in the first place.

Answer Capsule

Berkshire, Franklin and Hampshire counties recorded 19,155 crashes from 2022 through 2024, with 82 fatal crashes, 3,896 involving injury, 188 involving a bicycle and 235 involving a pedestrian, according to MassDOT crash records. That is 4.73 per cent of all Massachusetts crashes but 7.54 per cent of all fatal ones, a rate of 4.28 fatal crashes per 1,000 against a statewide 2.68. Franklin County is the highest of the three at 5.80 per 1,000, roughly 2.16 times the state rate, with Hampshire at 4.10 and Berkshire at 3.80. On every other measure the region is below the state: injury share 20.3 per cent against 22.9, bicycle crashes 9.81 per 1,000 against 10.75, pedestrian crashes 12.27 per 1,000 against 14.76. Within the region the fatal rate tracks town size sharply. The fifty-nine communities recording fewer than 300 crashes over the three years produced 37 of the region’s 82 fatal crashes on 4,122 crashes, a rate of 8.98 per 1,000, while the eighteen larger communities produced 45 fatal crashes on 15,033, a rate of 2.99. Pittsfield is the only western community in the statewide top fifty for total crashes, at 34th with 2,809; Northampton is 73rd and Greenfield 95th, and no other western community reaches the top hundred. Thirty-four of the seventy-seven communities in the dataset recorded no fatal crash at all across the three years, so the small-town ratios rest on small counts and move a great deal on a single collision. MassDOT crash records contain no traffic volume, so this data cannot separate a dangerous road from a busy one. Civil cases arising from crashes in these counties are heard in the Berkshire County Superior Court at 76 East St. in Pittsfield, the Franklin County Superior Court at 43 Hope St. in Greenfield, and the Hampshire County Superior Court at 15 Gothic St. in Northampton. This is general information and not legal advice. Call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS; the first telephone consultation is offered without charge.

The Small Town Effect

This is the sharpest cut in the western data, and it survives being looked at from several directions.

Split the seventy-seven communities at 300 crashes over the three years. Fifty-nine fall below that line. Eighteen sit at or above it.

The fifty-nine small towns recorded 4,122 crashes and 37 fatal crashes. That is 8.98 fatal crashes per 1,000, which is three and a third times the statewide rate.

The eighteen larger communities recorded 15,033 crashes and 45 fatal crashes. That is 2.99 per 1,000, barely above the statewide 2.68.

So the region’s elevated death rate is not spread evenly across it. Pittsfield, Northampton, Greenfield, Amherst and the other larger communities look close to ordinary Massachusetts. The rural towns do not. Twenty-one and a half per cent of the region’s crashes happen in those fifty-nine towns, and forty-five per cent of its deaths.

The caveat has to be stated with the same emphasis as the finding. Thirty-four of the seventy-seven communities recorded no fatal crash at all across the three years. Many of the small towns that did record one recorded exactly one, on a base of a few dozen or a few hundred crashes, and a ratio built on a numerator of one is extremely unstable. That is precisely why the comparison above is made as a single aggregate across fifty-nine towns rather than as a league table of individual small towns. The aggregate is built on 4,122 crashes and 37 deaths, which is enough to say something; the individual town ratios inside it mostly are not.

Among towns large enough for their own ratio to carry some weight, the highest rates in the region are Great Barrington at 7.2 fatal crashes per 1,000, on 4 out of 552; Lenox at 6.6, on 3 out of 456; Belchertown at 5.7, on 3 out of 530; and Deerfield at 5.6, on 2 out of 356. Each of those still rests on a handful of collisions, and none should be read as a ranking of how dangerous a town is to drive in.

Where the Crashes Actually Are

Only seven of the seventy-seven western communities are large enough to clear the dataset’s threshold for a published town page and a top-road list. That fact is worth stating plainly, because it shapes what can and cannot be said about this region, and it is the mirror image of the eastern counties where dozens of communities qualify.

Community	County	Crashes	Fatal	Injury	Bicycle	Pedestrian	Statewide rank
Pittsfield	Berkshire	2,809	9	620	50	57	34
Northampton	Hampshire	1,602	4	355	30	33	73
Greenfield	Franklin	1,313	4	294	22	24	95
Amherst	Hampshire	1,072	3	213	15	28	109
Hadley	Hampshire	983	3	155	6	7	119
North Adams	Berkshire	947	1	146	3	8	124
Easthampton	Hampshire	870	3	145	5	13	134

Pittsfield is the only community west of the Connecticut River valley’s larger towns to reach the statewide top fifty, at 34th of 349. Northampton at 73rd and Greenfield at 95th are the only other western communities in the top hundred at all. For comparison, the Essex County piece on this site identified four of its communities inside the statewide top twenty. That is the volume difference between eastern and western Massachusetts stated in the plainest available terms.

North Adams is worth a second look for the opposite reason. It recorded 947 crashes and one fatal crash across the three years, a rate of 1.1 per 1,000, which is the lowest of the seven and well under half the statewide figure. It also recorded only 3 bicycle crashes and 8 pedestrian crashes. On this data, North Adams is the safest of the region’s larger communities by a wide margin.

Hadley is the reverse curiosity: 983 crashes, ranking 119th of 349, on a town with a very small footprint. Almost all of that is one road, which is covered separately in the piece on Route 9 crash data, where Russell Street in Hadley recorded 142 crashes in 2024 alone.

The Highest-Crash Roads, 2024

These are the roads that appear in the 2024 top-road lists for the seven qualifying communities, with the count for that single year.

Pittsfield. East Street 40, Dalton Avenue 38, North Street 33, West Housatonic Street 27, Merrill Road 22, Hubbard Avenue 22, Cheshire Road 19, and the South Street stretch carried as US Route 20 eastbound at 19. That is a spread rather than a single hot spot: eight roads, none dominant, which is the pattern of a small city where the crashes are distributed across the street grid rather than concentrated on one arterial.

Greenfield. The Mohawk Trail at 33 is the highest, followed by Federal Street at 27 and Main Street at 21. A further 11 appear at the rotary complex where the ramp from Interstate 91 northbound meets Routes 2 and 2A, recorded in the source under a compound name that stitches Rotary Circle, the ramp and the Mohawk Trail together. Greenfield is the point where a rural two-lane route, an interstate ramp and a downtown street grid all meet inside a mile, and the crash record shows it.

Northampton. The Bridge Street and Damon Road pairing at 33, King Street at 19, Bridge Road at 17 and Main Street at 14.

Amherst. West Street 31, North Pleasant Street 26, Main Street 24, East Pleasant Street 18 and Bay Road 18. Amherst also records 28 pedestrian crashes against 15 bicycle crashes, the highest pedestrian count of any community in the region outside Pittsfield, which is what a university town’s crash record tends to look like.

Easthampton. Northampton Street 31, Cottage Street 26, Union Street 12, East Street 10 and Main Street 10.

North Adams. Church Street 16, State Road 16, a second Church Street entry at 10, West Main Street 9 and Union Street 8. The duplicate Church Street entries are an artefact of how the road name was written on the underlying reports, one with a route tag and one without, and they are listed here as the source lists them rather than combined.

Hadley. Russell Street 142, which is Route 9 and is covered in the corridor piece linked above.

The other seventy communities in the region record no top-road list in the dataset at all. On the roads where a great many of the region’s fatal crashes actually occur, the numbered state routes and the rural two-lanes running between towns, the published data simply does not resolve to a street name.

Where a Case Is Heard

A civil case arising from a crash is generally heard in the county where the crash happened, and the three western counties each have their own Superior Court.

• Berkshire County Superior Court, 76 East St., Pittsfield, MA 01201.
• Franklin County Superior Court, 43 Hope St., Greenfield, MA 01301.
• Hampshire County Superior Court, 15 Gothic St., Northampton, MA 01061.

Those addresses were verified against the court location pages on mass.gov on 21 August 2026. District Court division coverage across these counties was not verified on that date and is therefore not enumerated here rather than guessed at.

The practical point for anyone in the region is geographic rather than legal. The law applied in Pittsfield is the law applied in Boston. What differs is distance. A crash on a rural road in northern Berkshire and a crash on a rural road in northern Franklin are perhaps sixty miles apart and go to courthouses in different cities, and the drive to either can be an hour or more from the towns each court serves. That matters for the practical business of a case, for appearances and for medical appointments with treating providers, and it is worth knowing early rather than discovering later.

Two deadline points apply across the region as they do everywhere in Massachusetts. The general period for a personal injury claim is three years under M.G.L. c. 260, sec. 2A, with exceptions, which is covered in the Massachusetts statute of limitations for personal injury. Where a public body is involved, and in a region with this much state-maintained road that is not unusual, the presentment deadlines under M.G.L. c. 258 are far shorter, and those are discussed in suing the government in Massachusetts.

What This Data Can and Cannot Tell You About a Claim

A crash history does not decide a case. Fault is determined from the evidence of the particular collision: the crash report, the scene, the vehicle positions and damage, any video, and the accounts of the people who were there. 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 that share is greater than the combined share of those the claim is against. How that works in practice is set out in comparative negligence in Massachusetts.

Where a road’s history can matter is in a claim that the road itself was defective, because whether a public body had reasonable notice of a defect is written into the governing statutes, and a documented pattern of collisions at a location is one of the things that speaks to notice. Even there it is context rather than proof.

Two more things this data does not contain, stated so nobody infers them. It does not contain traffic volume, so the fatal rate per 1,000 crashes cannot be converted into a rate per mile driven or per resident. And it does not contain cause. Nothing here identifies speed, impairment, weather, road design or vehicle type as the reason behind the western fatal rate. The gap between 4.28 and 2.68 is real and it is in the record; the explanation for it is not in this dataset, and this article does not invent one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How many crashes happen in western Massachusetts each year?

A: Berkshire, Franklin and Hampshire counties together recorded 19,155 crashes across calendar years 2022, 2023 and 2024 in MassDOT’s crash records, which averages roughly 6,385 a year across all seventy-eight municipalities. Berkshire accounts for 8,151 of the three year total, Hampshire 7,558 and Franklin 3,446. For scale, the state recorded 405,245 over the same period, so the three counties together make up 4.73 per cent of Massachusetts crashes.

Q: Which western Massachusetts county has the highest fatal crash rate?

A: Franklin, at 5.80 fatal crashes per 1,000 crashes, on 20 fatal crashes out of 3,446 across the three years. That is about 2.16 times the statewide figure of 2.68 per 1,000. Hampshire follows at 4.10 per 1,000, on 31 out of 7,558, and Berkshire at 3.80, on 31 out of 8,151. All three are above the state. Franklin is also the smallest of the three by crash volume, which means its ratio is built on a smaller base and is correspondingly less stable than the other two.

Q: Which western Massachusetts town has the most crashes?

A: Pittsfield, with 2,809 crashes across 2022 through 2024, which ranks it 34th of the state’s 349 communities and makes it the only western community in the statewide top fifty. Northampton is next at 1,602 and 73rd, then Greenfield at 1,313 and 95th, Amherst at 1,072, Hadley at 983, North Adams at 947 and Easthampton at 870. Those seven are the only communities in the three counties large enough to clear the dataset’s threshold for a published town page.

Q: Why do rural Massachusetts roads have a higher death rate?

A: This data shows the pattern but does not explain it. What it shows is stark: the fifty-nine western communities with fewer than 300 crashes over the three years recorded 37 fatal crashes on 4,122 crashes, a rate of 8.98 per 1,000, while the eighteen larger communities recorded 45 on 15,033, a rate of 2.99. So 21.5 per cent of the region’s crashes produced 45.1 per cent of its deaths. MassDOT crash records contain no cause field, no traffic volume and no emergency response times, so nothing here identifies speed, road design, distance from a trauma centre or anything else as the reason. The pattern is in the record; the explanation is not, and this article does not supply one it cannot support.

Q: Is it safer to drive in western Massachusetts than in eastern Massachusetts?

A: The honest answer is that this data cannot say, because it contains no measure of how much driving happens. What it can say is that a crash in the three western counties was more likely to be a fatal one and less likely to be recorded as an injury crash than a crash statewide: 4.28 fatal per 1,000 against 2.68, and 20.3 per cent injury against 22.9 per cent. It can also say that the region records fewer crashes involving cyclists and pedestrians as a share of crashes, at 9.81 and 12.27 per 1,000 against 10.75 and 14.76. Those are statements about crashes that happened, not about the risk of driving a mile.

Q: Which court would hear a crash case in Berkshire, Franklin or Hampshire County?

A: A civil case is generally heard in the county where the crash happened. The Berkshire County Superior Court sits at 76 East St. in Pittsfield, the Franklin County Superior Court at 43 Hope St. in Greenfield, and the Hampshire County Superior Court at 15 Gothic St. in Northampton, all verified on mass.gov. Which of the Superior Court and the District Court a case belongs in depends on the amount in controversy and on procedural rules rather than on geography, and the law applied is the same across the Commonwealth. The practical difference in this region is travel distance, which can be substantial from the smaller towns.

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 here. Only seven of the seventy-seven western communities in the dataset publish a top-road list, so the great majority of the region’s roads, including many of the numbered state routes and rural two-lanes where the fatal crashes concentrate, never appear by name. A road’s absence from a published list says something about the size of the dataset’s threshold and nothing 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: 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 are published for every Massachusetts community clearing the dataset’s threshold at the Massachusetts crash report, and the Pittsfield, Northampton, Greenfield, Amherst, Hadley, North Adams and Easthampton figures above can be checked against their town pages there. Egremont and the sixty-nine other western communities below the threshold contribute to no figure on this page.

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 seventy-seven 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 about western Massachusetts show up in this data and both have practical consequences after a crash.

The first is that the crashes that happen here are more likely to be the serious kind. A fatal rate half again above the state, and three and a third times the state in the smallest towns, describes a region where a smaller number of collisions produce a disproportionate share of the worst outcomes. Those are the cases where the questions about coverage, about which policies are available and about what happens when the at-fault driver’s limits are inadequate matter most, and they are covered in uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage in Massachusetts.

The second is distance. The courthouses are far apart, the state-maintained roads are a large share of the network, and the presentment deadlines that apply when a public body is involved are short. Those deadlines are the ones that get missed while somebody is still recovering.

Jim Glaser Law handles injury claims across Massachusetts, including the western part of the state and the Connecticut River valley cities of Springfield and Chicopee, whose county figures are set out in the Hampden County crash data piece. 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.