Three Dead In Two Separate Homicide Crashes On Route 6 In Dartmouth This Week
Back-to-back crashes within a half-mile stretch of highway in the South Coast town of Dartmouth have claimed the lives of three people this week on a MassDOT-controlled highway with well-documented safety problems.
On Monday morning, a driver struck and killed a 74-year-old woman who was riding a bicycle along Route 6 in Dartmouth.
The Bristol County District Attorney’s Office reports that police responded to a 911 call around 11:53 a.m. Monday morning near the intersection of Route 6 and Reed Road, on the west side of Dartmouth and about half a mile east of the Westport town line.
Police reported that when the arrived at the scene, a dump truck was pulled over on the right side of the highway. The victim – whom police have not yet identified – was pronounced dead on the scene.
After an initial investigation, police allege that the operator of the dump truck drove their vehicle into the 74-year-old victim.
StreetsblogMASS reached out on Wednesday morning to the office of Bristol County District Attorney Thomas Quinn III to inquire whether the homicide suspect had been arrested, whether they are facing any criminal charges, or whether they are still at large.
As of 4 p.m. on Wednesday, Quinn’s office had still not responded to multiple calls and emails.
Just three days earlier, another homicide crash had killed two more people about half a mile away on the same highway.
At around 7:35 p.m. on Friday, July 10, Dartmouth and Westport police responded to multiple 911 calls for a crash near the Dartmouth-Westport town line.
Photos from that scene showed two vehicles with severe front-end damage, with scattered debris in the grassy median of the Route 6 highway.
Police reported that the driver of one of the vehicles, Tristan Bedient, 34 of Acushnet, and a passenger, Kate Aldrich, 51 of New Bedford, both died shortly after being transported to a local hospital.
Two occupants of the other vehicle reportedly suffered non-life threatening injuries.
Route 6 embodies obsolete, unsafe highway design principles
Route 6 is a four lane, divided highway that slices a high-speed, straight-line course across Dartmouth and Westport, and the posted speed limit for most of its length is 45 mph. MassDOT’s District 5 (based in Taunton) is responsible for the highway.
Prior to the completion of Interstate 195 in the late 1960s, Route 6 was the primary highway connecting New Bedford and Fall River.
Route 6 bears many of the same characteristics as the interstate highway that eventually replaced it: it was built to encourage high-speed travel with a wide, straight layout, multiple lanes, and a grassy median that (usually) separates drivers from oncoming traffic.
But unlike the interstate, Route 6 is also lined with 20th-century suburban sprawl of strip malls, motels, and drive-through restaurants.
Those businesses are dangerously inaccessible for anyone travelling outside a private automobile. Long stretches of Route 6 have no sidewalks, and where sidewalks do exist, they tend to be broken and inaccessible to wheelchair users.
On the west side of Dartmouth and in Westport, marked crosswalks to get across Route 6 can be more than a mile apart from each other.
A 2022 Route 6 Corridor Study conducted by the regional Southeastern Regional Planning and Economic Development District warned that Route 6 in Dartmouth and Westporn “contains several intersections that are ranked on the region’s Top 100 Most Dangerous Intersections list” and that the highway’s current design creates “a dangerous commute for anyone who chooses to ride their bicycle along or across the corridor.”
That study concluded that MassDOT should reduce the number of lanes and the overall width of the roadway on Route 6, reduce speed limits, and reallocate some of the existing highway’s roadway space to create new, protected sidepaths for bike riders and pedestrians.
Jacqueline Jones, the Assistant Director of Transportation Planning for SRPEDD, told StreetsblogMASS that MassDOT had initiated a project to implement some of the 2022 study’s recommendations in Westport, but she added “no recent progress has been made” and confirmed that MassDOT has not committed any funding to continue any design or construction work on that project.
There are also no safety investments planned for Route 6 in Dartmouth or Westport in MassDOT’s most recent 5-year capital spending plan.
Jones added that there has also been one minor project to repair sidewalks and crosswalks near the Route 6/Cross Road intersection, “but to date, no larger project or other effort has been initiated to address identified needs on Route 6.”
StreetsblogMASS has also reached out to MassDOT’s press office to inquire why improving safety on Route 6 hasn’t been a priority for the agency, and to ask whether the agency will implement any emergency safety measures in the wake of this week’s killings.
We’ll update this story when they respond.
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