Deadly Lynnway Intersection Claims Its Second Victim This Year
On Friday morning, a truck driver struck and killed an unidentified victim who was riding their bicycle at the intersection of the Lynnway and Commercial Street in Lynn.
It was the second time this year that a truck driver has killed someone at this intersection.
On January 19th, the driver of a tractor trailer truck killed Paul Addonizio, a 71 year-old Lynn resident.
State Police have released little information about Friday’s crash, beyond the fact that the killing occurred around 11 a.m. at the intersection of the Lynnway at Commercial Street.
The victim, who has not yet been identified, was riding a bike when the truck driver struck them. Police confirmed the victim’s death within a few hours of the crash.
State police are leading the investigation because the Lynnway is a state roadway. In spite of its six lanes of asphalt and broken sidewalks, the Lynnway is a “parkway” under the ownership of the state’s Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR).
Since 2021, police have responded to at least 87 crashes at this intersection – an average of 16 crashes every year, according to MassDOT’s IMPACT crash database.
23 of those crashes were violent enough to injure at least one victim.
In 2022, the MBTA, MassDOT, and DCR won $20 million federal grant to implement a safer, transit-focused redesign of the Lynnway.
In a 2021 federal grant application, MassDOT and the MBTA proposed to redesign the Lynnway by sacrificing some of its existing lanes to make room for “center-running bus lanes with transit signal priority, a shared use path along the eastern edge of the Lynnway, improved bus stops, and improved pedestrian crossings.”
In the past year, the T has been hosting public hearings for an early draft of that redesign.
But in those hearings, MBTA officials revealed that they intend to sacrifice key elements for bike and pedestrian safety in order to preserve more lanes for car traffic and avoid impacts to adjacent parking lots.
The proposed shared-use bike and pedestrian path, which had originally been envisioned to extend the full length of the Lynnway from the General Edwards Bridge to downtown Lynn, has now been truncated to end at Commercial Street – the same intersection where two people have died so far this year.
The T is also considering an alternative with an even shorter path that would dead-end at Harding Street.
StreetsblogMASS has reached out to MBTA officials to ask whether the pattern of violence at the Commercial Street intersection would compel the project designers to advocate more forcefully to prioritize safety over traffic flow. We’ll update this story when they send us a response.
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