Massachusetts Drivers Committed At Least 354 Homicides In 2025
In 2025, one in every five fatal crashes in Massachusetts involved a person walking, and those killings were disproportionately concentrated in “environmental justice” neighborhoods with higher-than-average populations of lower-income and non-white households, according to a new analysis of crash records from WalkMassachusetts.
Earlier this morning, WalkMassachusetts published Fatal Pedestrian Crashes in Massachusetts 2025, the organization’s fifth annual report tracking pedestrian deaths across the Commonwealth.
The report analyzes the state’s official crash database to data to examine patterns in roadway violence and make recommendations for making streets safer.
The overall number of driver-involved homicides remains stubbornly high, in spite of new “vision zero” policies, lower speed limits in many of the Commonwealth’s cities, and new requirements for safer street designs in state-funded road projects.
Drivers killed 76 pedestrians in 2025, higher than the average from the past 23 years when detailed fatal crash data is available. Roadway homicides spiked in the years immediately after the Covid-19 pandemic, but have now generally returned to pre-pandemic levels.
46 of those pedestrian killings – more than half of the state’s total – occurred in “environmental justice” neighborhoods where there are higher concentrations of non-white or lower-income households.
A statewide problem
“Probably the biggest takeaway from this report is that this is not just a big-city thing. There were 49 communities across Massachusetts with at least one fatal crash involving a pedestrian,” Brendan Kearney, the executive director of WalkMassachusetts, told StreetsblogMASS on Tuesday.
The report also finds that older adults are much more likely to be victims in these homicides: 43 percent of the people killed while walking last year were 65 or older, even though that age group represents only 19 percent of the statewide population.
“The percentage of older victims is actually higher this year than it’s been since we’ve started doing this report,” said Kearney.
Still, the report notes that some communities in Massachusetts are making concerted efforts to improve roadway safety – and the data indicates that those efforts are making a difference.
“Somerville has been doing great things,” says Kearney. “And they’re showing their work – they have a safe streets ordinance and they also put out a data indicators report every year where they report where they’ve installed things like raised crosswalks, speed humps, and how it’s affected the number of crashes. So it’s showing people that this stuff is working.”
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