Pedestrian and bicycle crash hotspots in Boston and Manchester

If you were hit walking or biking somewhere between Boston and Manchester, New Hampshire, you're not dealing with a freak occurrence. Massachusetts logged 128,769 crashes of all kinds in 2025¹, and Boston alone logged 451 crashes in April 2026². Buried inside those totals is a much smaller, far deadlier pattern: a short list of streets and intersections that produce a disproportionate share of the pedestrian and cyclist injuries and deaths in this market. Boston has tracked this for a decade. The city averages roughly 1,900 serious or fatal crashes a year since 2015³, and the same handful of corridors keeps showing up at the top of that list.

The corridors that keep producing crashes

Two intersections a few blocks apart in the South End top Boston's list: Massachusetts Avenue at Melnea Cass Boulevard, and Massachusetts Avenue at Albany Street. Between January 2015 and May 2024, the two combined for 220 crashes, 86 of them involving a pedestrian and 27 involving a cyclist, according to a Boston Globe analysis of the city's Vision Zero crash database³. At Mass Ave and Melnea Cass alone, 49 pedestrians have been struck since 2015, and city safety officials call it the single most dangerous intersection in Boston³.

The rest of the city's worst locations cluster in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Roslindale: Cedar Street at Columbus Avenue, American Legion Highway at Walk Hill Street, the length of Morton Street running from Jamaica Plain through Mattapan and Dorchester, and Columbia Road from Dorchester to the waterfront³. As of October 2024, the city had logged 137 pedestrian crashes and eight pedestrian deaths for the year, seven of them at intersections³.

Boston tracks all of this through Vision Zero, its push to eliminate fatal and serious crashes by 2030. The city sees more than 10 traffic deaths a year on top of hundreds of pedestrian and cyclist injuries, and dropped its default speed limit to 25 mph in 2017 as an early countermeasure⁴. Zoom out to the region and the pattern sharpens: a High-Injury Network covering just 7 percent of roadway mileage in the Boston area accounted for about 65 percent of fatal and serious injury crashes between 2018 and 2022, and pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists were eight times more likely to be killed or seriously injured than people in cars⁵. Regional serious injuries climbed from 939 in 2018 to 1,066 in 2022, and fatalities rose from 99 to 142 over that stretch⁵. Outside Boston proper, the same regional plan flags Washington Street and Liberty Street in Lynn, Squantum Street in Quincy, and Hampshire Street in Cambridge as high-scoring corridors⁵.

A cyclist's death on Tremont Street

The clearest recent example of what these numbers mean happened on July 9, 2026. Louisa Gag, a 36-year-old Roslindale native who worked as a bike-share and transportation planner for the city, was riding south on Tremont Street near Parker Street in Mission Hill, about a block north of the Roxbury Crossing Orange Line station, when a truck driver swerved around a car turning left and struck her around 8:20 a.m⁶⁷.

Tremont Street wasn't a mystery to city planners. Officials had flagged the corridor in 2023 for lacking basic bike safety and comfort, and a citywide study this spring found that roughly 90 percent of Boston's urban bike commuters have no low-stress route to get to work⁷. MassDOT's own crash database shows 20 more injury crashes on the half-mile stretch of Tremont between Roxbury Crossing and Brigham Circle since the start of 2022⁶. Two blocks away, a pedestrian named Diva Helena Pina de Carvalhoa was killed at Tremont Street and Malcolm X Boulevard in December 2024⁶. A planned busway project for Tremont and Columbus Avenues that would have added traffic calming near Roxbury Crossing was delayed indefinitely in March 2026⁶.

Cambridge and Somerville, a split record

Cross the river and the map looks different. Inman Square, straddling the Cambridge-Somerville line, has a documented history as the state's worst bicycle crash location: MassDOT's own Top Crash Locations Report counted 106 bicycle crashes there, 71 of them causing injury, more than any other intersection in the state⁸. Cyclist Amanda Phillips was killed at the Hampshire Street and Cambridge Street corner in 2016, one of five pedestrian and 10 bicycle crashes recorded at the intersection in the three years before her death⁹. The redesign that followed split the intersection in two and added a protected bike lane and a public plaza⁹.

Cambridge cyclists lost two more riders within a single month in June 2024: one struck by a truck at Hampshire and Portland streets near Kendall Square, another, a 55-year-old riding a rental Bluebike, killed at Mount Auburn and DeWolfe streets near Harvard Square¹⁰.

Somerville tells a different story. A June 2026 assessment of a decade of Vision Zero work across Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville found Somerville had gone without a traffic fatality for three straight years and cut serious-injury crashes by half¹¹¹², even as its Mystic Avenue and McGrath Highway corridor, once dubbed a "corridor of death," remains a known trouble spot¹¹.

The statewide trend

Massachusetts pedestrian deaths have swung sharply. They jumped 35 percent in a single year, from 75 in 2021 to 101 in 2022, with Boston recording more of those deaths (12) than any other city, followed by Worcester (7) and Chicopee (5)¹³. Most of that spike hit older pedestrians in low-income neighborhoods after dark¹³. By 2025 the count had eased to 76 deaths, still 21 percent of the state's 354 total traffic fatalities, even as Boston's pedestrian injury count rose from 465 in 2024 to 571 in 2025¹². People 65 and older made up 43 percent of pedestrian deaths despite being under 19 percent of the population, and more than two-thirds of fatal crashes happened after dark¹². MassDOT ranks crash locations using a rolling 10-year window, because pedestrian and bicycle crashes, while disproportionately severe, are too small a share of total crashes for shorter time frames to produce reliable clusters¹⁴.

Manchester and southern New Hampshire

The New Hampshire side of this market has its own trouble spots. A road safety audit of Hanover Street and Beech Street in Manchester found 36 crashes over the 10 years from 2005 to 2015, including one pedestrian death, three incapacitating injuries, and eight non-incapacitating injuries, with improper driving and disregard of traffic control devices as the leading causes¹⁵. Statewide, New Hampshire logged 2,516 pedestrian-vehicle crashes and 1,673 bicyclist-vehicle crashes between 2010 and 2019, the bicycle crashes alone including 10 deaths and 100 serious injuries¹⁶.

Manchester is now mid-construction on a response. The $30 million RAISE Manchester project, funded by a $25 million federal grant plus a $5 million local match, is rebuilding pedestrian and bicycle access around Commercial and Granite streets, the South Willow Street and Queen City Avenue intersection, and the Elm Street corridor downtown, with construction running toward a 2029 completion target¹⁷.

If you're hit walking or biking here

None of this is abstract if you're the one lying in the street. Crash reports, EMS records, and city Vision Zero data all get pulled into an injury claim, and where you were hit can matter to that claim. A documented high-injury corridor, or a known history of complaints at that exact intersection, can become part of the evidence for why a crash happened. If you've been hurt walking or biking in this market, an attorney who handles these cases can help you sort out what the crash data and police report actually support. You can find one through the legal directory.

This is general information, not legal advice.

Sources

1. thatcarhitme.com, Massachusetts Statewide Crash Report, 2025 Annual: 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. The Boston Globe, "Boston averages 1,900 serious or fatal crashes per year. Here are the most dangerous intersections," Oct. 22, 2024: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/10/22/data/boston-traffic-high-accident-intersections/

4. City of Boston, Vision Zero: https://www.boston.gov/departments/transportation/vision-zero

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

6. Streetsblog Massachusetts, "Driver Kills Bicyclist on Tremont Street In Mission Hill," July 9, 2026: https://mass.streetsblog.org/2026/07/09/driver-kills-bicyclist-on-tremont-street-in-mission-hill

7. The Boston Globe, "'Systemic failure': Crash that killed Boston transit planner sparks furor over road safety efforts," July 10, 2026: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/07/10/metro/louisa-gag-cyclist-fatal-crash-tremont-street/

8. Massachusetts Department of Transportation, 2009 Top Crash Locations Report: https://www.mass.gov/doc/2009-top-crash-locations-report/download

9. Cambridge Day, "In the 2016 death of bicyclist Amanda Phillips, investigators find crash aspects 'unavoidable,'" July 2, 2019: https://www.cambridgeday.com/2019/07/02/in-the-2016-death-of-bicyclist-amanda-phillips-investigators-find-crash-aspects-unavoidable/

10. Cambridge Day, "Second bicyclist dies in Cambridge in a month following crash in an intersection with a truck," June 21, 2024: https://www.cambridgeday.com/2024/06/21/second-bicyclist-dies-in-cambridge-in-a-month-following-crash-in-an-intersection-with-a-truck/

11. Streetsblog Massachusetts, "It's Not Nothing: LivableStreets Report Assesses Progress In Three Cities After A Decade of 'Vision Zero,'" June 26, 2026: https://mass.streetsblog.org/2026/06/26/not-zero-yet-livablestreets-report-assesses-progress-in-three-cities-after-a-decade-of-vision-zero

12. The Union Leader, "Pedestrian fatalities account for 1 in 5 traffic deaths in Massachusetts": https://www.unionleader.com/wire/pedestrian-fatalities-account-for-1in-5-traffic-deaths-in-massachusetts/article_72f64510-fe06-4877-91ce-919a11c4c367.html

13. CBS News Boston, "Deadly pedestrian crashes up 35 percent in Massachusetts, report says": https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/massachusetts-increase-fatal-pedestrian-crashes

14. Mass.gov, "Top crash locations and maps": https://www.mass.gov/info-details/top-crash-locations-and-maps

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

16. New Hampshire Department of Transportation, New Hampshire Statewide Pedestrian and Bicycle Plan (draft): https://mm.nh.gov/files/uploads/dot/remote-docs/nh-ped-bike-plan-2023.pdf

17. Manchester Ink Link, "RAISE Manchester preliminary plans for downtown pedestrian/bicycle access near completion": https://manchester.inklink.news/raise-manchester-preliminary-plans-near-completion/