Where Do Most Motorcycle Accidents Happen in Massachusetts?

Most Massachusetts motorcycle crashes happen on ordinary city streets in daylight on dry pavement, not on highways, at night, or in bad weather. MassDOT crash records for 2022 through 2024 carry 5,623 crashes involving a motorcycle, of which 175 were fatal and 4,003 involved an injury. Just over half of them, 52.5 percent, happened at no junction at all, meaning mid-block rather than at an intersection. Another 38.5 percent happened at an intersection of some kind, most often a T-intersection rather than a four-way. Daylight accounted for 72.5 percent and dry pavement for 92.4 percent. Two thirds of them, 65.0 percent, happened where the posted speed limit was 25, 30 or 35 miles an hour. By municipality, Boston recorded the most at 261 over the three years, followed by Springfield at 204 and Worcester at 199, but Springfield recorded the most deaths, 12 against Boston’s 8. The number that gives all of this weight is the severity gap: motorcycles were in 1.4 percent of Massachusetts crashes and 16.1 percent of the fatal ones, which works out to 31.1 fatal crashes per 1,000 motorcycle crashes against 2.68 per 1,000 for crashes generally. Every figure here comes from a MassDOT query run on 2026-08-13 and can be checked against the town pages in the Massachusetts crash report. To talk through a specific crash, call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS; the line is answered 24 hours a day, and the first telephone consultation is free.

Where the Numbers Come From

MassDOT publishes Massachusetts crash records as open data, one dataset per calendar year, built from the crash reports police departments and drivers file with the Registry of Motor Vehicles. Each record carries a field describing the configuration of every vehicle involved, so a crash where one of the vehicles was a motorcycle can be counted directly rather than estimated.

The counts below are every 2022, 2023 and 2024 record in which at least one vehicle was a motorcycle. That includes a motorcycle striking a car, a car striking a motorcycle, a motorcycle going down on its own, and the small number of crashes involving two motorcycles. It is a count of crashes, not of riders, so a crash that injured a rider and a passenger counts once.

Year by year, the volume is flat and slightly declining while the deaths are not:

Year	Motorcycle crashes	Fatal	Injury
2022	1,952	55	1,407
2023	1,865	55	1,297
2024	1,806	65	1,299
Three-year total	5,623	175	4,003

Across the same three years Massachusetts recorded 405,239 crashes of every kind and 1,087 fatal ones. So motorcycles appear in 1.39 percent of crashes and 16.10 percent of fatal crashes.

That is the whole argument for taking a motorcycle claim seriously as its own category. Expressed as a rate, 31.1 of every 1,000 motorcycle crashes killed someone, against 2.68 of every 1,000 crashes generally. A motorcycle crash in Massachusetts is roughly eleven and a half times more likely to be fatal than a crash chosen at random. Nothing about that ratio depends on who was at fault, and it holds steady across all three years.

One limitation, stated up front. These are counts, not rates per motorcycle or per mile ridden. A town with more motorcycle crashes may simply have more motorcycles moving through it. Where this piece compares places, it compares them on shares and ratios rather than treating the raw count as a danger score.

The Fifteen Busiest Municipalities

Ranked by motorcycle-involved crashes over the three years:

Community	Motorcycle crashes	Fatal
Boston	261	8
Springfield	204	12
Worcester	199	5
New Bedford	149	3
Fall River	147	1
Brockton	89	2
Lynn	85	3
Chicopee	83	4
Taunton	80	3
Haverhill	70	0
Lowell	69	3
Quincy	67	0
Holyoke	65	0
Plymouth	63	3
Fitchburg	62	0

The list is a list of cities. It is not a list of highway towns, resort towns, or the rural western hill towns where a Sunday ride is the stereotype. Full three-year crash figures of every kind for four of them are published at Boston, Springfield, Worcester and Lowell.

Answer Capsule

Massachusetts recorded 5,623 crashes involving a motorcycle from 2022 through 2024 in MassDOT crash records, of which 175 were fatal and 4,003 involved an injury, against 405,239 crashes and 1,087 fatal crashes of every kind over the same three years. Motorcycles therefore appear in 1.39 percent of Massachusetts crashes and 16.10 percent of the fatal ones, a fatal rate of 31.1 per 1,000 motorcycle crashes against 2.68 per 1,000 crashes generally. On location, 52.5 percent occurred at no junction, 20.8 percent at a T-intersection, 14.9 percent at a four-way intersection, 2.8 percent at a Y-intersection and 2.3 percent at a driveway, so intersections of all kinds account for 38.5 percent. By conditions, 72.5 percent happened in daylight, 92.4 percent on dry pavement, and 82.0 percent inside a large urbanized area against 4.3 percent classed as rural. By posted speed limit, 30 miles an hour was the most common at 1,646 crashes, then 25 at 1,037 and 35 at 973, so 65.0 percent occurred at limits of 25 to 35. The single busiest hour was 4pm at 574 crashes, and the block from noon through 7pm holds 62.8 percent of the three-year total. By municipality Boston recorded the most at 261, then Springfield at 204 and Worcester at 199, but Springfield recorded the most fatal motorcycle crashes at 12 against Boston’s 8, Worcester’s 5 and Chicopee’s 4. On the law, helmets are required of every operator and passenger under M.G.L. c. 90, sec. 7, and a driver turning left across an approaching motorcycle must yield under M.G.L. c. 89, sec. 8. A Massachusetts motorcycle policy does not provide personal injury protection to the rider, which changes the claim substantially and is worked through separately. Call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS; the first telephone consultation is free.

Springfield, Not Boston, Is Where Riders Die

Boston has more motorcycle crashes than anywhere else in Massachusetts. Springfield has more fatal ones, and by a wide margin: 12 against 8, on a quarter fewer crashes.

The full fatal ranking over the three years runs Springfield 12, Boston 8, Worcester 5, Chicopee 4, and then a group of eight communities at 3 apiece: Lowell, West Springfield, New Bedford, Newbury, Lynn, Lakeville, Methuen and Plymouth.

Two things about that list are worth sitting with. First, three of the top five are in Hampden County, in and around Springfield. That regional concentration is not a motorcycle-only pattern; the same county already showed the worst fatal-crash ratio in this series across all vehicle types, which is set out in the Hampden County crash data. Second, the group at 3 includes Newbury and Lakeville, two small towns that do not appear anywhere near the volume list. A town can record a handful of motorcycle crashes over three years and have three of them kill someone, which is what a small denominator looks like and why a fatal count is not a danger ranking on its own.

The honest reading is narrow: Springfield stands out because 12 deaths across three years is far enough clear of the field to be a real signal rather than noise, and the rest of the fatal table is too thin to rank.

Just Over Half Are Not at an Intersection

This is the finding most likely to be different from what a rider expects, because road-safety messaging is heavily focused on intersections.

Where on the road	Crashes	Share
Not at a junction	2,954	52.5 percent
T-intersection	1,170	20.8 percent
Four-way intersection	838	14.9 percent
Y-intersection	158	2.8 percent
Driveway	127	2.3 percent
Off-ramp	103	1.8 percent
On-ramp	91	1.6 percent
Traffic circle	88	1.6 percent

Intersections of every description come to 2,166 crashes, or 38.5 percent. Mid-block is the majority position at 52.5 percent.

The T-intersection figure deserves its own note. T-intersections produced 1,170 motorcycle crashes against 838 at four-way intersections, so a rider is about 40 percent more likely to be hit at a T than at a full crossroads. A T is where a driver pulls out of a side street into a road they were never travelling on, judging a gap in traffic. Judging the gap is exactly the task drivers perform worst when the oncoming vehicle is a single narrow headlight rather than a car-shaped mass, which is the well-documented reason motorcycles get pulled out in front of.

The Angle Crash and the Left Turn

Sorting the same 5,623 crashes by how the vehicles came together:

Manner of collision	Crashes	Share
Single vehicle	1,877	33.4 percent
Angle	1,526	27.1 percent
Rear-end	858	15.3 percent
Sideswipe, same direction	526	9.4 percent
Head-on	226	4.0 percent
Front to rear	164	2.9 percent
Sideswipe, opposite direction	144	2.6 percent
Front to front	104	1.8 percent

A third of Massachusetts motorcycle crashes involve no second vehicle. Some of those are a rider losing the bike on their own, and some are a rider going down avoiding something. The record does not separate the two, so no conclusion about fault is available from the category itself, and an insurer who treats “single vehicle crash” on a police report as an admission is reading a code that does not mean that.

The angle category, 1,526 crashes, is the classic pattern: two vehicles arriving from directions that cross, which is what a left turn across an approaching motorcycle produces and what a car pulling out of a side street produces. Massachusetts puts that duty on the turning driver in plain terms. M.G.L. c. 89, sec. 8 provides that “any operator intending to turn left, in an intersection, across the path or lane of vehicles approaching from the opposite direction shall, before turning, yield the right-of-way until such time as the left turn can be made with reasonable safety,” and that where two vehicles reach an intersection “at approximately the same instant, the operator of the vehicle on the left shall yield the right-of-way to the vehicle on the right.” A violation carries “a fine of not less than thirty-five dollars,” which tells you nothing about the size of a civil claim and everything about the fact that the duty is written down.

A citation is not the same thing as civil liability, and a Massachusetts jury decides fault on the whole picture rather than on the ticket. How that works, including what happens when both people did something wrong, is set out in how fault is determined and in comparative negligence.

Daylight, Dry Pavement, Thirty Miles an Hour

The conditions data is one-sided enough that it changes the picture of what a Massachusetts motorcycle crash actually is.

Light: 4,075 crashes in daylight, 72.5 percent. Another 941, 16.7 percent, on a lit road after dark, and only 253, 4.5 percent, on an unlit road after dark. Dusk added 233 and dawn 66.

Road surface: 5,193 crashes on dry pavement, 92.4 percent. Wet pavement accounted for 268, 4.8 percent. Sand, mud, dirt, oil or gravel accounted for 81.

Setting: 4,612 crashes, 82.0 percent, inside what the record classes as a large urbanized area. Small urbanized areas added 490, and rural accounted for 240, or 4.3 percent.

Posted speed limit, which is the single most useful field on this list:

Posted limit	Crashes
30 mph	1,646
25 mph	1,037
35 mph	973
40 mph	531
None recorded	369
45 mph	269
65 mph	217
55 mph	203
50 mph	147
20 mph	116

Limits of 25, 30 and 35 account for 3,656 crashes, 65.0 percent of the three-year total. Add the 40 mph roads and you are at 74.5 percent. The 65 mph roads, which is to say the interstates, account for 217 crashes, under 4 percent.

Put the four findings in one sentence and the picture is a rider on a city street with a 30 mile an hour limit, in the afternoon, on dry pavement, in clear light. That is not the crash most people picture, and it matters for a claim, because the conditions that would ordinarily be raised against a rider are absent from the overwhelming majority of these files.

The Hours

The distribution by hour is the sharpest in the dataset:

Hour	Crashes
4pm to 4:59pm	574
5pm to 5:59pm	557
3pm to 3:59pm	460
2pm to 2:59pm	436
6pm to 6:59pm	414
1pm to 1:59pm	406
7pm to 7:59pm	372
Noon to 12:59pm	312

The eight hours from noon through 7:59pm hold 3,531 crashes, 62.8 percent of the three-year total, in a third of the day. The peak is the afternoon commute, not the late-night hours the category is usually associated with.

Why There Is No Road Ranking Here

The other pieces in this series rank individual roads, because for cars the road-name field in the MassDOT record is clean enough to support it. For motorcycles it is not, and publishing a ranking anyway would be inventing precision.

The problem is name fragmentation against a much smaller sample. The top motorcycle entries over three years are “MAIN ST Rte” at 87 crashes, “MAIN ST” at 46 and “MAIN STREET” at 17, which are three spellings of what is in practice a Main Street in every city in the Commonwealth rather than one road. Below those, no single named road clears 30 crashes across three years. With 5,623 crashes spread across every road in Massachusetts and the naming split three ways, the correct statement is that no individual road stands out for motorcycle crashes, and the concentration is by road type, city streets at 25 to 35 miles an hour, rather than by road name.

For crashes of every kind, where the sample is 72 times larger and the ranking does hold up, the road-level detail is in the Interstate 93, Interstate 495 and Route 128 pieces.

What the Location Facts Change About a Claim

The data is not decoration. Three things follow from it that come up in real files.

The first is the left turn. With 27.1 percent of these crashes in the angle category and the statutory duty in c. 89, sec. 8 sitting on the turning driver, the single most common serious motorcycle case in Massachusetts is a driver who turned across a rider who had the right of way. The driver’s account is almost always some version of not seeing the motorcycle. Not seeing a vehicle that was there to be seen is not a defence to the duty to yield.

The second is the conditions. An insurer evaluating a motorcycle file reaches for rider fault early, and the usual raw material is speed, weather, darkness and inexperience. On this data, 92.4 percent of these crashes were on dry pavement and 72.5 percent in daylight, and two thirds were on roads posted at 35 or below. Those are not conditions that support a story about a rider outrunning the visibility.

The third is helmet use, which is where riders most often expect the claim to fall apart. M.G.L. c. 90, sec. 7 does require protective headgear of “every person operating a motorcycle or riding as a passenger on a motorcycle or in a sidecar attached to a motorcycle,” with the only carve-out being a rider aged 18 or over in a properly permitted public parade. The same section requires eye protection where the motorcycle has no windshield or screen. But a violation of that requirement does not end a claim by itself, and the reasoning is worked through in detail in Massachusetts motorcycle accident law, which also explains the point that changes a motorcycle claim more than any other: a Massachusetts motorcycle policy does not provide personal injury protection to the person on the motorcycle, which removes the medical-bill threshold that limits a car occupant’s claim and removes the at-fault driver’s usual tort exemption at the same time. If the crash involved a lane position dispute, is lane splitting legal in Massachusetts covers that ground.

Two deadlines are worth knowing at the start rather than at the end. A Massachusetts tort action must generally be brought within three years, which is covered in the statute of limitations piece, and a written crash report to the Registry is due far sooner than that.

If you were hurt riding in one of the cities above, the practice-area pages for Boston, Springfield, Worcester and Lowell carry the local venue and hospital detail for those places. Head injuries are the most common severe outcome in this category, and what a claim involving one looks like is set out in the traumatic brain injury article.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How many motorcycle accidents happen in Massachusetts each year? A: About 1,800 to 2,000 a year. MassDOT crash records carry 1,952 crashes involving a motorcycle in 2022, 1,865 in 2023, and 1,806 in 2024, a three-year total of 5,623. Fatal motorcycle crashes over the same three years were 55, 55 and 65, a total of 175, and crashes involving injury were 1,407, 1,297 and 1,299, a total of 4,003. The volume is flat to slightly declining while the fatal count rose in the most recent year.

Q: What city in Massachusetts has the most motorcycle accidents? A: Boston, with 261 motorcycle-involved crashes from 2022 through 2024, followed by Springfield at 204, Worcester at 199, New Bedford at 149 and Fall River at 147. Springfield is the exception on severity: it recorded 12 fatal motorcycle crashes over the three years against Boston’s 8, on about a quarter fewer crashes. These are raw counts rather than rates per motorcycle on the road, so a busier city will tend to appear higher for reasons that have nothing to do with how it is ridden.

Q: Do most motorcycle accidents happen at intersections? A: No, but it is close. Over the three years 52.5 percent of Massachusetts motorcycle crashes were recorded at no junction, meaning mid-block, while intersections of every type together account for 38.5 percent. Within the intersection group the T-intersection is the leader at 20.8 percent of all motorcycle crashes, ahead of the four-way at 14.9 percent, which is the pattern of a driver pulling out of a side street across a rider who had the right of way.

Q: Are most Massachusetts motorcycle crashes on highways? A: No. Roads posted at 25, 30 or 35 miles an hour account for 65.0 percent of them, and adding 40 mph roads brings it to 74.5 percent. Roads posted at 65 miles an hour, which is to say the interstates, account for 217 crashes over three years, under 4 percent of the total. By setting, 82.0 percent occurred inside a large urbanized area and 4.3 percent in a rural area. The Massachusetts motorcycle crash problem is a city-street problem.

Q: How much more dangerous is a motorcycle crash than a car crash in Massachusetts? A: On these records, roughly eleven and a half times more likely to be fatal. Motorcycles were involved in 5,623 of the 405,239 crashes recorded from 2022 through 2024, which is 1.39 percent, but in 175 of the 1,087 fatal crashes, which is 16.10 percent. That works out to 31.1 fatal crashes per 1,000 motorcycle crashes against 2.68 per 1,000 crashes of every kind. The comparison is between crashes, not between riders and drivers, and it says nothing about who caused any individual crash.

Q: What time of day do most motorcycle accidents happen in Massachusetts? A: The afternoon. The single busiest hour is 4pm to 4:59pm at 574 crashes over the three years, followed by 5pm at 557 and 3pm at 460. The eight hours from noon through 7:59pm hold 3,531 crashes, 62.8 percent of the three-year total, in a third of the day. Only 4.5 percent of these crashes happened on an unlit road after dark.

Q: Does weather cause most motorcycle accidents in Massachusetts? A: No. Dry pavement accounted for 5,193 of the 5,623 crashes, 92.4 percent, and wet pavement for 268, 4.8 percent. Daylight accounted for 72.5 percent. That matters in a claim, because an insurer looking to shift responsibility onto a rider often starts with conditions, and in the overwhelming majority of these files the conditions were clear and the road was dry.

Q: Can I still bring a claim if I was not wearing a helmet? A: Not wearing one is a violation of M.G.L. c. 90, sec. 7, which requires protective headgear of every operator and passenger, but a violation of that kind does not bar a Massachusetts claim by itself. It is treated as evidence bearing on the rider’s own conduct, and it only reaches damages that the missing helmet actually contributed to. The analysis, along with the reason a Massachusetts rider’s claim is not limited by the medical-bill threshold that applies to car occupants, is set out at length in the Massachusetts motorcycle accident law article. Facts vary, and a specific crash needs a specific answer.

Q: Is Jimmy Knows AI giving me legal advice? A: No. This is general information about Massachusetts law and public Massachusetts crash data, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Whether any of it applies to your situation depends on facts that are not in this article. To have someone look at the actual facts, call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS; the line is answered 24 hours a day, and the first telephone consultation is free.