In Brief:
- Massachusetts’ rate of traffic deaths per vehicle mile traveled is less than half the rate of the U.S. as a whole.
- Congestion on state roads and a robust hospital system help mitigate deadly crashes, says Massachusetts Highway Administrator Jonathan Gulliver.
- State transportation planners also regularly review every traffic fatality to explore patterns and potential solutions.
Traffic safety in the U.S. has gotten worse in recent years. After decades of declining deaths on the roadways, more people began to die in car crashes after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost 47,000 people died on U.S. roads in 2021, compared to about 39,000 in 2019, according to the National Safety Council. Traffic deaths have risen in every state during that period, according to some figures.
But some states are safer than others. According to recent figures published by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, an estimated 18,720 people died on roads in the first half of 2024. Mississippi had the highest rate of traffic deaths during that period, with 1.8 people killed per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT). Massachusetts had the lowest rate, with 0.51 people killed per 100 million VMT, according to the figures — less than half the rate of the U.S. as a whole. Still, someone dies on a Massachusetts road practically every day. According to state data, 343 people were killed on Massachusetts roads last year.
Governing recently spoke with Massachusetts Highway Administrator Jonathan Gulliver about the factors that make the state’s highways less deadly than others and about the Massachusetts Department of Transportation’s (MassDOT) efforts to improve safety on its roads. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
By some measures Massachusetts has one of the lowest rates of traffic fatalities of any state in the country. How does MassDOT track that information and what metrics do you pay attention to?
We track that very closely. We use a lot of crash data that comes in through the Registry of Motor Vehicles (RMV). We have a crash portal that makes it easier for law enforcement to enter data directly. To just comment on your thesis, we do quite well nationally with the fatality metrics. It’s still not where we want to be. We as a state have been strong proponents of Vision Zero, getting to zero deaths on the highways. That’s obviously not an easy thing to do, but having that vision really pushes us to work with municipalities and adopt best practices to try to get there.
As a state we’re very highly congested. That’s another list that we always top, unfortunately. But those two things, in part, go hand in hand. High-speed crashes, which went up during the pandemic, have dropped back down again now, because it’s hard to get up to the right speed for a high-speed crash when you’re in an area that’s so congested.
One of the other things that we benefit from to keep our fatality rates down is we have a very robust hospital system. In most places in the state you’re not that much farther than 15 minutes from a hospital that can treat you. So if you are involved in a crash, getting to treatment very quickly is a critical component that you can do here.
Why else do you think Massachusetts has a relatively low rate of traffic deaths?
I like to think it’s also because of some of the policies we’ve put in place. We have really put a lot of focus on safety in everything we do. It’s something that’s really ingrained in the culture of MassDOT but it’s something we’ve also put a big focus on in our design efforts. Any time we’re designing an intersection or doing any work on the highway at all or doing new facilities, we’ve really embraced what’s known as the Safe Systems Approach.
The Safe Systems Approach effectively acknowledges that despite best efforts, drivers are going to behave differently than you expect them to. Part of that approach is to try to anticipate driver behavior — going beyond what we think they should do and looking at what they actually will do. Will a driver at a “No Right on Red” sign take that turn anyway? If the answer is yes, then should we add an extra bump-out to the sidewalk to ensure that pedestrians are safer? That sort of thing.
We’re particularly proud of a safety bill that we worked really closely with the Legislature on these last couple of years that went into effect and some parts are still being promulgated now that improved a lot of things, especially for vulnerable road users — bikers, pedestrians, people on the side of the road doing a tire change. We added regulations that require drivers to stay at least 4 feet away from them. We distributed signs all over the state to sign the roadways like that.
Transportation planners have been criticized in some circles for focusing on level of service and moving cars as quickly as possible. Massachusetts is probably fairly well built out with highway infrastructure, but when you are doing new roads and interchanges and things like that, how do you balance trying to move vehicles versus trying to keep people safe?
It is a balancing act. I think safety is in both theories. For the people who want to reduce congestion, looking at it from a safety standpoint is important. I mentioned earlier getting to a hospital — really important if you’re in a crash. If your roadways to that hospital are so congested you can’t get there, that’s as big of a problem as the conditions that caused the crash to begin with.
On a number of roadways we’ve been focusing on getting rid of so-called bottlenecks. Those bottlenecks themselves cause crashes. They may not be high-speed crashes and a lot of them are rear-end crashes but they’ve created dangerous intersections that are due to congestion. We consider it a safety improvement if we can go into one of these bottleneck intersections and redesign it in a way that gets traffic flowing in a more organized structure that’s going to be better for everybody and reduces congestion. As you said, we are built out. We’re not building any new facilities. We’re improving the ones we have, and we’ve been in that mode for at least 20 years now.
Can you say a bit more about the interactions with local governments? State DOTs and locals aren’t always on the same page.
We really pride ourselves on our relationship with the local governments. We have six district offices and we have positions in those offices that are liaisons back and forth to the cities and towns in those districts. We work to make sure that whatever project we’re doing is matching the character of those towns. Despite being your quintessential New England state, there’s a huge difference between Boston and the Berkshires and Cape Cod. Recognizing those differences and working with those cities and towns really helps make sure we’re getting them the projects they need and the ones they want.
We’ve also dramatically expanded our local grant program. We make targeted grants available to cities and towns. If you adopt a Complete Streets program focused on making space on roads for all users and you work with us to get the right training for your planners and your traffic staff and others, we will make this grant money available to you. It’s a way of ensuring that cities and towns are now interested in the policies that we think they should be interested in and they’re using that money in smart ways to make those changes in their towns.
You mentioned that the traffic injury and death rate went up in Massachusetts during COVID-19 like it did in other states. Have you seen your state’s stats mirror other states even though you’re at the lower end of that scale?
We ticked upward during the pandemic even more than we had expected. And I’ve heard a lot of theories as to the reasons why from a lot of my colleagues across the country. I think the one I subscribe to for us is, all of a sudden, if you’re on a roadway where every day you can barely get above 40 miles an hour and all of a sudden you can hit 90 without seeing another soul, I think a lot of people just did that. They get used to being at this high speed with no one around them and unfortunately that leads to tragic situations. It took some time for that to settle back down again. I’m sure there’s other theories out there but that’s the one I generally subscribe to.
You mentioned earlier that the number of deaths you are seeing on the roads is still way too many. Do you have an overall strategy for further reducing those numbers and are you trying to hit certain targets each year?
We filed the Massachusetts Strategic Highway Safety Plan last year and that is kind of a road map for where we want to get to. We developed that with law enforcement and municipalities and safety professionals and others to develop the metrics we want to go toward and some of the strategies we want to use. That was a big important plan for us to go through that kind of gives us a map for the future. There’s no magic bullet here. It takes a lot of hard work by our traffic safety section, a lot of continuous monitoring, working closely and regularly with law enforcement.
One of the strategies we use that is very effective is that we do a fatalities meeting. Every two weeks a cross-agency team gets together and they look at every single roadway fatality that happened over the last two weeks to see if we can identify any patterns at all. I will tell you it’s rare that it’s something that’s not attributed to a DUI or driver error. But every once in a while we’ll see something and think, you know what, we should reach out to that city or town and work with them to eliminate, for example, a passing zone on a two-lane road. That’s a real one that we did a few years ago was to start systematically removing passing zones across all of our highways and to work with cities and towns on it because we were seeing an increase in crashes in those spaces. That also served as a way for us to put out some targeted messaging toward motorcyclists because we were seeing a lot more motorcycle injuries and deaths a couple years ago. That meeting served as a way for us to identify that type of problem.
There’s teams that work on this stuff every day that run that meeting but we very deliberately bring in the top-level staff. Myself, the registrar, the secretary of transportation, we serve as the executive committee and once a quarter we get together with that group and see firsthand the kind of things they’re seeing. I think that’s incredibly helpful and important. With the number of deaths you see on the roadway, for somebody who just looks at the numbers I think it’s easy to get numb. Our people are really good about pulling together, “Hey, this is a person. Here’s what she did. Here’s what her life was all about.” They pull information from the obituary. It puts a whole different perspective on it and it really causes you as somebody who’s in charge of this stuff to really take a serious look at it and want to do whatever you can to make it better.
Have you redesigned roads because of that information?
Again, it’s rare that it’s a road design issue. It’s more frequent that we ask law enforcement to jump in and do targeted enforcement. There have been a couple times when we’ve said improved signage would be beneficial. The one I can point to that was more of a design issue was we made the decision to start systematically closing up those passing zones. We’ve been doing that for a number of years and we’ve accelerated it in a few spots because of those discussions.
