walkboston

Statewide Fatal Crashes in MA, June 2021

Each month in 2021, we plan to post about the fatal crashes in Massachusetts from the previous month, and share any trends that we see. Last month, we took a look at the 8 fatal crashes listed in the MassDOT Crash Portal in May. In this post, we’ll look at crashes in MA in June 2021. The information in the chart below is compiled from news reports, and was checked against the MassDOT Crash Portal Dashboard “Fatal Information by Year.” The Google Street View images included below use the address listed in the crash portal.

Of the 38 fatal crashes in Massachusetts in June in the MassDOT Crash portal, 4 were identified as people walking.
The crash portal does not include names. The names of 2 of the people walking who died have not been made public yet.
The average age of pedestrians hit & killed in June was 63.5.
At least 2 of the crashes were hit & runs (as referenced in news articles).
The name of the person driving was not identified in 3 of the crashes in news articles that we found.

Date	6/8/2021, 6:34 AM
Location	SR-2 EAST, MM 38.4
Town	Shelburne
Type	PEDESTRIAN
Age	45
Sex	F

45 year old Rhonda Thompson was out on a morning walk along the breakdown lane of Mohawk Trail / Rt 2 in Shelburne Falls when she was struck and killed by Peter Toomey. The Hampshire Franklin Daily Voice reports that he has pleaded not guilty to charges of leaving the scene of an accident resulting in death; negligent motor vehicle homicide; and failure to stay in marked lanes. The district attorney said the defendant told police his truck had struck a deer the previous evening; once placed under arrest, he said he did not stop since the woman he with was with someone whom he assumed would summon help.

According to the MassDOT Road Inventory, this street is under MassDOT jurisdiction. This stretch of road is one lane in each direction with shoulders on each side. The speed limit is 50 mph and there are no sidewalks.

Date	6/17/2021, 3:31 PM
Location	46 Daggett Dr.
Town	West Springfield
Type	PEDESTRIAN
Age	34
Sex	F

An unidentified 34 year old woman was hit and killed in West Springfield on Daggett Drive. The West Springfield Police Department were asking witnesses to come forward to help their investigation.

According to the MassDOT Road Inventory, this street is under local jurisdiction. The speed limit is 30 mph, and there is a sidewalk on one side of the street. Streetview on Google Maps shows two lanes in each direction, and that the sidewalks, curb ramps, and street were repaved in October 2019. There is one crosswalk to cross over Daggett Drive at the major intersection of Rt 5 / Riverdale Street. There are no crosswalks to cross over Daggett Drive throughout the rest of the shopping plaza.

Date	6/20/2021, 8:00 PM
Location	Columbia Rd. + Kosciuszko Cir.
Town	Boston
Type	PEDESTRIAN
Age	84
Sex	M

An unidentified 84 year old man was hit and killed at Columbia Rd + Kosciuszko Circle in Boston. We have not been able to find any news articles related to this crash.

According to the MassDOT Road Inventory, this section of the street and circle adjacent to Moakley Park is under MassDCR jurisdiction. According to a Road Safety Audit conducted in March 2019, this area includes Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP) high crash clusters for people walking, driving, and biking. A HSIP-eligible location is a crash cluster that ranks within the top 5% of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) based on crash incidence and severity. In March 2021, City and state agencies announced a Kosciuszko Circle /Morrissey Boulevard planning study to improve mobility and climate resiliency.

Date	6/23/2021, 6:59 PM
Location	Normandy Rd. WEST + Rose Kennedy Ln.
Town	Framingham
Type	PEDESTRIAN
Age	91
Sex	M

91 year old Huiman Ping was struck and killed by an unidentified 62 year old driver of a Honda Civic on Normandy Road in Framingham. The MetroWest Daily News reported that the Framingham Police said the driver from Holliston remained at the scene after the crash. According to the MassDOT Road Inventory, this street is under local jurisdiction. Framingham has a default speed limit of 25 mph.

Updates
If you have an update about a community member who was killed in one of these crashes, please contact Brendan so we can update our . WalkBoston has maintained a list each year since 2016, pulling the information from news reports, social media, and from people like you that share the information with us.
Yearly trackers: |||||

Reminder about the data from the MassDOT portal
MassDOT makes no representation as to the accuracy, adequacy, reliability, availability or completeness of the crash records or the data collected from them and is not responsible for any errors or omissions in such records or data. Under no circumstance will MassDOT have any liability for any loss or damage incurred by any party as a result of the use of the crash records or the data collected from them. Furthermore, the data contained in the web-based crash report tool are not an official record of what transpired in a particular crash or for a particular crash type. If a user is interested in an official copy of a crash report, contact the Registry (http://www.mass.gov/rmv/). The City of Boston Police Department may be contacted directly for official copies of crash reports and for crash data pertaining to the City of Boston. In addition, any crash records or data provided for the years after 2018 are subject to change at any time and are not to be considered up-to-date or complete. As such, open years’ of crash data are for informational purposes only and should not be used for analysis. The data posted on this website, including crash records and other reports, are collected for the purpose of identifying, evaluating or planning the safety enhancement of potential crash sites, hazardous roadway conditions or railway-highway crossings. Under federal law, this information is not subject to discovery and cannot be admitted into evidence in any federal or state court proceeding or considered for other purposes in any action for damages that involves the sites mentioned in these records (see 23 USC, Section 409).

Cambridge Street signals walk

Recently, Brendan Kearney and Wendy Landman joined the Boston Transportation Department’s Stefanie Seskin and Vineet Gupta for a walk down Cambridge Street from City Hall Plaza to Charles Circle (but not including the Circle) to talk everything signals. It was a great chance for WalkBoston to give Stefanie and Vineet some detailed input about the way a number of intersections work (or don’t work) for people on foot. There are a wide variety of intersection types, some that are very complicated with many turning movements and lots of vehicles, people walking and people on bikes, and others that are very simple T-intersections where the signals could be simplified and much more WALK time added. We’re looking forward to BTD’s next steps in thinking about how to make Cambridge Street work more safely for people walking, biking and driving. We will post again as the project progresses over the next 6 months.

making connections to make Stoneham safer for people walking

Earlier this week, WalkBoston staff facilitated a conversation between Stoneham’s Director of Planning & Community Development and a town resident who had read a recent Boston Globe story (“Together, neighbors can thwart speed demons. Here’s how“). She had reached out to WalkBoston with concerns regarding the lack of pedestrian crossings on the stretch of Main Street between North Border Road and Marble/Summer Streets, which is under MassDOT jurisdiction and signed as part of Massachusetts Route 28. South Elementary School is located on the east side of Main Street near the intersection with Summer Street, and she was concerned about her daughter and her friends being able to safely walk to and from school along this high-speed road. The town’s only public bus route, MBTA Route 132, also serves this section of Main Street and requires passengers to cross the wide stretch of road in order to access their origins and destinations.

The director of planning affirmed the resident’s concerns about pedestrian safety on Main Street, and shared a wish list for safe travel to and from school that had been compiled by parents and staff of the South School. She also discussed the potential for a road diet to be implemented on Main Street, which could tie into current planning efforts for a complete streets strategy in downtown Stoneham. She also informed us that approximately $4.2 million in Federal and State transportation funding has been allocated in the Boston MPO’s FY21-25 Transportation Improvement Plan to upgrade the intersection of Main Street, North Border Road, and Pond Street. For next steps, Stoneham will be reaching out to MassDOT District Four to discuss potential methods to improve pedestrian safety on Main Street in the short term.

Hybrid virtual and in-person walk audits expand engagement opportunities in Haverhill

As pandemic restrictions ease and we resume in-person activities, WalkBoston is bringing back our traditional in-person group walk audits while keeping many of the new tools we’ve developed over the last year.

Haverhill was the first of our Gateway Cities walk audits to benefit from this hybrid approach. Starting in late May, the hybrid walk audit gave participants the option to walk through Downtown Haverhill with us in a group or – using the self-guided walk audit process developed for pandemic walk audits – to walk on their own at a time that worked better for their schedule. Hybrid walk audits like this one can help us make the process more accessible to a broader range of participants.

Haverhill residents discuss lighting conditions under the Winter Street bridge during the in-person group walk of Downtown Haverhill.

The flexibility of the hybrid model also created an opportunity for the Haverhill walk audit to include an additional virtual element — a bilingual focus group organized with Haverhill’s Latino Coalition to ensure fuller representation of the community in this project. The focus group added 8 more residents’ voices to the walk audit and gave us new insight into how residents use and would like to change Section 2 of the walking route.

The Downtown Haverhill walk audit illustrates how the larger buffet of participation options we’ve developed over the past year have led to more inclusive and robust community engagement. Have an idea for other ways we can include people in the walk audit process? Let us know!

Comments on Re-Imagining Massachusetts’ Post-Pandemic Transportation System

Comments to Senate Committee on Re-Imagining Massachusetts Post-Pandemic Resiliency

Dear Senator Hinds and Committee Members:

WalkBoston is Massachusetts’ primary pedestrian advocacy organization, working across the Commonwealth to make it safer and easier for people to walk for all activities of daily living such as access to transit, school and jobs. The COVID-19 pandemic gave stark evidence that walkable neighborhoods and communities are critical to physical and mental health, to reducing isolation and to the resilience of all Massachusetts residents and their neighborhoods.

In light of the pandemic, we have learned that key components of the transportation system to support walking should include:

Speed management. We need measures to control, and often reduce, speeds on Commonwealth roadways so that they are safe for all roadway users. During the initial months of the pandemic, there was dangerous speeding on roadways across Massachusetts. MassDOT’s ongoing initiative to create tools and measures to set and manage safe speeds on all MassDOT roadways (other than limited access highways) needs the support and encouragement of the legislature to ensure its success, and then to bring those same measures to municipal roads as well.
Safe connections to transit. As we learned during the pandemic, essential workers are more dependent on transit than many others. We need fully accessible transit and bus stops throughout Massachusetts, including safe street crossings and sidewalk connections to adjacent neighborhoods. These are crucial to a transit system that works for everyone.
More local funding to repurpose public space. The overwhelmingly popular MassDOT Shared Streets and Spaces program that was introduced in response to the pandemic has demonstrated that municipalities are interested and ready to rethink how they use their streets to enable more and safer outdoor recreation,
commerce, community activities, and mobility.
Chapter 90 and Complete Streets. Chapter 90 funds have been traditionally used to build and maintain municipal roads without requirements that sidewalks and crosswalks be included. We suggest that the Committee review this standard and consider including Complete Streets measures within Chapter 90, similar to those requirements set by the legislature for MassDOT roadways.
DCR Parkways. DCR’s recently released (and long delayed) Parkway Master Plan clearly demonstrates that immediate action is needed to vastly improve safety for people bicycling and walking. Parkways are cultural and historic landmarks and should remain fully integrated components of parks and open spaces, used and enjoyed by people for walking, rolling, and riding as originally intended. With a commitment to accelerated improvement in partnership with MassDOT, parkways should remain under DCR’s purview. We urge the legislature to set funding and regulatory standards for DCR as follows:
- Adopt MassDOT’s Complete Streets guidelines as their default design standard for all parkways;
- Utilize MassDOT crash portal data to implement quick-build improvements on the most dangerous parkway roads and intersections within the next 12 months;
- Align its parkway speed limits with local speed limits, especially in municipalities where the default speed has been reduced to 25 miles/hour or less;
- Provide DCR with the budget needed to complete the recommendations in the DCR Parkway Master Plan;
- Require DCR to set measurable goals to reduce the number of serious and fatal crashes on DCR roadways and report publicly and annually on progress toward these goals; and
- Require DCR to add analysis and recommendations for several key parkways currently missing from the plan.

Thank you for the opportunity to comment.

Stacey Beuttell
Executive Director, WalkBoston
405 Waltham Street, Suite 309
Lexington, MA 02421
617-367-9255