The most dangerous intersections in metro Boston and Manchester, NH

If you've driven through Boston, Worcester, Quincy, or Manchester, New Hampshire this year, there's a decent chance you idled through an intersection that shows up on somebody's crash list. This market runs from the Massachusetts coast through Worcester County and into New Hampshire's Merrimack Valley, and the intersections locals already treat with caution tend to be the same ones planners and safety auditors keep flagging.

The scale behind that caution is real. Massachusetts logged 128,769 crashes statewide in 2025.¹ Boston alone recorded 451 crashes in April 2026 and 462 in March 2026.^{2 3} Zoom into the intersection level, and a small number of locations account for a disproportionate share of the crashes that actually hurt people.

Why intersections carry so much of the risk here

The Boston Region Metropolitan Planning Organization tracked fatal and serious injury crashes across the region from 2018 through 2022 and found that 44.1 percent happened at intersections, compared to 39.7 percent statewide. Four-way intersections and T-intersections together accounted for roughly 94 percent of those intersection deaths and serious injuries. Over that same five-year window, the region averaged close to 1,000 fatalities and serious injuries a year: serious injuries ranged from 779 to 1,066 annually, and fatalities climbed from 99 in 2018 to 142 in 2022. The MPO puts the total cost of regional crashes at 26.5 billion dollars over those five years, with fatal and serious injury crashes making up 12.2 billion dollars of it.⁴

Planners call the worst of it the High-Injury Network, roughly 7 percent of regional roadway mileage that accounts for about 65 percent of all fatal and serious injury crashes. Most of that mileage isn't state highway. Locally owned roads carry 74.4 percent of the region's fatal and serious injury crashes, versus 17.4 percent on MassDOT-owned roads.⁴ That's a big part of why the most dangerous spots tend to be ordinary city streets, not highway interchanges.

Pedestrians and cyclists carry an outsized share of the damage at these locations too. Vulnerable road users, meaning pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists, make up only 5 percent of total crashes in the region but 27 percent of fatal and serious injury crashes, and they're roughly eight times more likely than other road users to be killed or seriously hurt when a crash happens.⁴ That gap is a big part of why so many of Boston's named high-crash intersections below show up on both the motor-vehicle list and the bike or pedestrian list at the same time.

Boston's list centers on Massachusetts Avenue and American Legion Highway

Boston's own Vision Zero program mapped city-owned intersections by injury type for 2015 through 2017, and Massachusetts Avenue dominates it. Mass Ave at Beacon Street, at Commonwealth Avenue, and at Newbury Street all rank among the city's top five bike-injury intersections, clustered where the avenue crosses the Back Bay's cross streets. Mass Ave at Albany Street and Mass Ave at Columbus Avenue also made the list, along with Mass Ave at Melnea Cass Boulevard.⁵

Farther south, American Legion Highway shows up three separate times: at Blue Hill Avenue, at Walk Hill Street, and at Cummins Highway. Nearby, Harvard Street at Walk Hill Street, Blue Hill Avenue at Seaver Street, Harrison Avenue at Dudley Street, and Columbia Road at Washington Street round out the city's top motor-vehicle and pedestrian injury locations.⁵ Columbus Avenue at Cedar Street lands on both the bike and motor-vehicle injury lists.⁵

The suburbs have their own hot spots

Move outside Boston proper and the high-injury corridors just relocate. The MPO's subregional breakdown names Washington Street and Liberty Street in Lynn, Squantum Street in Quincy, Hampshire Street in Cambridge, the Massachusetts Avenue and Bedford Street area in Lexington, Concord Street and Waverly Street in Framingham and Wellesley, the Middlesex Turnpike corridor through Woburn, Stoneham, and Burlington, Rantoul Street and Essex Street in Beverly, Salem, and Peabody, and Middle Street, Pleasant Street, and Union Street in Weymouth and Braintree.⁴

The traffic volume behind those corridors shows up in the monthly numbers. Worcester logged 308 crashes in April 2026, more than any other city in the market outside Boston.⁶ Quincy had 139 that month.⁷ Framingham had 111.⁸ Cambridge had 94.⁹ Brockton, Newton, Waltham, and Medford each logged between 84 and 132 crashes over the same period.¹⁰ MassDOT ranks crash locations statewide with a methodology that weighs total crash volume against severity, drawing on records logged in the Registry of Motor Vehicles' Crash Data System.¹¹

Manchester and the New Hampshire side of the market

The market's New Hampshire half centers on Manchester and the surrounding Merrimack Valley, and NHDOT has run its own street-level safety audits there. A road safety audit of Union Street at Valley Street in Manchester found 65 crashes over the ten years from 2005 through 2015.¹² A separate audit of Hanover Street at Beech Street, also in Manchester, found 36 crashes over that same decade.¹³ NHDOT has also directed federal congestion and safety funding toward Mammoth Road, or Route 28A, for the 1.7-mile stretch between Bridge Street and the Cilley Road/Huse Road interchange.¹⁴ The Southern New Hampshire Planning Commission, Manchester's federally designated regional planning agency, runs its own high-crash-location and signal-warrant studies for the surrounding towns.¹⁵

What this means if you're hurt at one of these

None of this makes any single intersection more or less dangerous on the specific day you happen to drive through it. But the pattern holds on both sides of the state line: wide arterials with heavy turning movements and mixed pedestrian, cyclist, and vehicle traffic keep generating a disproportionate share of the region's serious crashes, year after year. Most of that risk sits on ordinary local streets that a city or town controls, not on a state highway someone else is responsible for maintaining.

If you're hurt in a crash at one of these locations, or anywhere else in the market, the intersection's own crash history and the police report can both matter to a claim. An attorney who handles these cases regularly can help you sort out fault and next steps; you can start looking through the legal directory.

This article is general information, not legal advice.

Sources

1. thatcarhitme.com, "Massachusetts, MA Year-over-Year Crash Report, 2025 vs 2024," https://thatcarhitme.com/crash-data/massachusetts/statewide/2025-annual-report

2. thatcarhitme.com, "Boston, MA Crash Report, April 2026," https://thatcarhitme.com/crash-data/massachusetts/boston/april-2026-report

3. thatcarhitme.com, "Boston, MA Crash Report, March 2026," https://thatcarhitme.com/crash-data/massachusetts/boston/march-2026-report

4. Boston Region Metropolitan Planning Organization, "Vision Zero Action Plan," https://www.bostonmpo.org/data/html/plans/Vision-Zero/Vision-Zero-Action-Plan.html

5. City of Boston, Vision Zero Boston, "Boston High Crash Intersections, 2015-2017," https://www.boston.gov/sites/default/files/embed/2/2019-01-15_top_intersections.pdf

6. thatcarhitme.com, "Worcester, MA Crash Report, April 2026," https://thatcarhitme.com/crash-data/massachusetts/worcester/april-2026-report

7. thatcarhitme.com, "Quincy, MA Crash Report, April 2026," https://thatcarhitme.com/crash-data/massachusetts/quincy/april-2026-report

8. thatcarhitme.com, "Framingham, MA Crash Report, April 2026," https://thatcarhitme.com/crash-data/massachusetts/framingham/april-2026-report

9. thatcarhitme.com, "Cambridge, MA Crash Report, April 2026," https://thatcarhitme.com/crash-data/massachusetts/cambridge/april-2026-report

10. thatcarhitme.com, Brockton, Newton, Waltham, and Medford, MA Crash Reports, April 2026: https://thatcarhitme.com/crash-data/massachusetts/brockton/april-2026-report, https://thatcarhitme.com/crash-data/massachusetts/newton/april-2026-report, https://thatcarhitme.com/crash-data/massachusetts/waltham/april-2026-report, https://thatcarhitme.com/crash-data/massachusetts/medford/april-2026-report

11. Massachusetts Department of Transportation, "Top crash locations and maps," https://www.mass.gov/info-details/top-crash-locations-and-maps

12. New Hampshire Department of Transportation, Road Safety Audit, "Manchester, New Hampshire: Union Street and Valley Street," https://www.dot.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt811/files/inline-documents/manchester-union-and-valley-street.pdf

13. New Hampshire Department of Transportation, Road Safety Audit, "Manchester, New Hampshire: Hanover Street and Beech Street," https://www.dot.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt811/files/inline-documents/manchester-hanover-and-beech-street.pdf

14. New Hampshire Department of Transportation, CMAQ Projects Selected for the Ten Year Plan, https://www.dot.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt811/files/inline-documents/cmaq-projects-selected-for-typ.pdf

15. Southern New Hampshire Planning Commission, Transportation, https://www.snhpc.org/193/Transportation