In late 2015, “inspired by the belief that even one fatality is too many”, Boston committed to Vision Zero, an internationally adopted program to eliminate traffic fatalities in cities. In their Action Plan, city leaders said, “Vision Zero Boston is our commitment to focus the city’s resources on proven strategies to eliminate fatal and serious traffic crashes in the city.” While the city has made some progress towards eliminating traffic violence, newly released data shows a gap between commitment and reality: pedestrian fatalities in both of the last two years were higher than in any year since 2016. Just before the launch of Vision Zero in 2015, there were 20 total fatalities, including 9 pedestrians. In 2025, there were 13 fatalities, including 10 pedestrians. The program has not been a complete failure — severe crashes involving pedestrians dropped by 27% since 2015, and crashes involving bikers dropped by 47%. But motor vehicle crashes are down only 8%, and severe crashes for bikers and pedestrians have trended upwards since 2020.
These sobering numbers come amid explosive reporting from the Boston Globe and StreetsblogMASS that Mayor Wu has halted essentially all road and transit safety improvement projects. In response to the article, Wu asserted that she still prioritized safety, explaining, “Sometimes in the push for urgency and for speed of getting things done, things got lost in translation.” But the facts don’t need translating: there were 13 deaths and 3,412 serious injuries last year. Boston has made progress with its safety improvements, but it’s been inconsistent, particularly as the city has ignored many of its own recommendations to address the most high-risk areas. The choice of City Hall to pull back on its Vision Zero commitments is a mistake, and it risks undoing a decade of progress.
For this article, I will rely on the city’s Vision Zero Crash Database, which tracks the date, time, and location of motor vehicle crash incidents in which an emergency response was required for injuries or fatalities through the end of 2025. They categorize incidents by whether they involve pedestrians, cyclists, or solely drivers. The city vets all incidents in the database, making it the most up-to-date and accurate count of crashes in Boston available.
After a decline, pedestrian crashes are on the rise
The chart below shows a three-month running average of pedestrian crash incidents in Boston over the last decade. The total remains stable throughout the launch of Vision Zero, and the first notable decline comes with the reduction of the speed limit in Boston from 30 to 25. Following this, the average number of crashes dropped, although it’s notable that there was seemingly little change in the number of pedestrian fatalities over that period, although fatalities among motorists did fall. This is surprising given that a main justification for lowering speed limits was to reduce fatal crashes with pedestrians. Unfortunately, we lack data on injury severity, which we would assume would have declined after the change. Still, it seemed to reduce total crashes, an overall win.
But in the years that followed, the rate of pedestrian injury crashes remained static. While the city did undertake a number of improvements for cyclists, meaningfully reducing the number of cyclist injuries, there was much less focus on making concrete changes to improve pedestrian safety, and the data reflects that. This exposes an important, if obvious, lesson: you need to invest in infrastructure and make intentional improvements to make our streets safer. It's not enough to say you want safer streets, you need to take action. Boston did that with cyclists and it worked. It demurred with pedestrians, and little changed. The largest decline came only with the pandemic, a significant shock that perhaps lulled policymakers into complacency. Crashes declined, but not as a result of anything the city did, and the structural problems with our infrastructure still lurked. While the Vision Zero team did not issue a report between 2018 and 2023, crashes and pedestrian deaths continued. Every year since has seen more crashes, with 2023 being notably violent. Particularly worrying has been the sharp increase in deaths, which doubled from 2023 to 2024.
Cyclists see far fewer crashes, cars don’t
The data on cyclist crashes is more optimistic, even as bike infrastructure has remained one of the most contentious policy issues in the city. Indeed, there were half as many bike crashes in 2025 as in 2015, and it doesn’t appear to be driven by the pandemic. Crashes declined steadily through 2019, no doubt thanks to significant improvements in bike lanes and other infrastructure that have made biking far safer. More work remains to be done, and the spike from 2023 to 2024 shows just how fragile progress can be, but the city deserves credit. It’s also a reminder that we got here through intentional policy and infrastructure buildouts, and that tearing up bike lanes, as some have proposed, will only make things less safe for bikers and drivers alike.
Car crashes are another story. While there are around half as many fatalities as there were in 2015-2016, the total number of injuries and crashes remains stubbornly high. There were 2,818 such crashes in 2015, and 2,585 in 2025, a number which has been remarkably stable since the pandemic. We might conclude that the speed limit reduction could have helped reduce fatalities, but it seems that whatever the underlying issues — road size, phone use, intersection design — Boston can’t make a dent in car crashes. One compelling explanation for this and other traffic violence trends is the near-elimination of police traffic enforcement. Reddit user ARPE19 compiled data on Boston police, finding that BPD significantly reduced traffic enforcement starting in 2017, reaching a low point in 2022 when they wrote only 20% of the tickets they did in 2015. It is hard to deny that the total lack of traffic enforcement, which anyone in Boston can testify to, leads to an extremely permissive atmosphere of dangerous driving. I see at least half a dozen people run red lights every day on my way to work, and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen someone pulled over (it is zero).
This trend isn’t confined to Boston — it’s happening across the nation and likely contributes to the national rise in car crash deaths over the last decade. In large part stemming from the murder of George Floyd and the racial reckoning with police1, law enforcement stepped away from things like speeding citations. Pre-textual stops are a real abuse. That’s a separate question from whether police should enforce speed limits at all.
At the intersection of race and traffic violence
Unsurprisingly, intersections are frequent sources of crashes given they represent the most complex traffic interactions. In any year, 40-50% of all crashes occur within intersections. Unfortunately, the most dangerous intersections 10 years ago are more or less still the most dangerous today. A large focus of the Vision Zero program was increasing safety at ‘high crash intersections,’ which has had some positive results.
Of the top 10 intersections with the most car crashes from 2015-2019, seven were also in the top 10 for 2020-2025. However, the average number of crashes at those specific intersections has decreased. The most dangerous intersection for drivers from 2015-2019 was Harvard St at Morton St, which averaged 10.4 crashes per year. While it was the 6th most dangerous intersection from 2020-2025, it now averages just 6.0 crashes per year. Again, we see meaningful progress made possible by a concerted effort to improve our infrastructure. In a testament to what a dedicated and responsive government can do with safety improvements, 7 of the 10 top intersections saw a decrease in crashes over the last decade. Still, intersections like Freeport St at Morrissey Blvd, saw an increase in crashes over that time. There’s a similar story with pedestrian crashes — six were in the top 10 across both periods. Nine of the top 10 in 2015-2019 saw a decrease in average annual crashes, suggesting the improvements at identified high-risk intersections are working. The city deserves credit for making these specific intersections safer for pedestrians and drivers. Boston needs to keep making improvements instead of resting on its laurels.
The intersections also tell another story, one indicative of broader trends in traffic violence in Boston and around America: minority-majority communities are disproportionately impacted by dangerous roads. Of the 10 most dangerous intersections for cars, nine were located in Dorchester, Roxbury, or Mattapan,2 even though these neighborhoods make up just a quarter of Boston’s area. It is little surprise that the most dangerous intersections are located on high-speed stroads that are relatively more common in historically black or immigrant neighborhoods.
To further examine the variation in car crashes, I’ve used the geolocated crash data to plot the rate of traffic violence in neighborhoods. The map below shows the number of pedestrian crashes in 2025 per 1,000 residents of that neighborhood.3 Two groups stand out: the downtown core and Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. A low population and many more commuters easily explain the high rate downtown. But that isn’t the case in the overwhelmingly residential and less dense communities of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. Indeed, the pedestrian crash rate is 50% higher than that of Roslindale or Hyde Park, and more than double the rate in South Boston or the South End!
It’s hard not to see a trend in which communities are most exposed to traffic violence, and most in need of programs like Vision Zero. It’s a trend we have known about for years, including in a prominent 2022 paper by the Boston University4 and Harvard Chan schools of public health:
“During all hours of the day, [Raifman and Choma] found that White Americans biked at almost four times the distance per capita as Black Americans, but Black Americans died at more than 4 times the rate (4.5) per mile cycling than White Americans. Compared to White Americans, Black Americans also experienced traffic deaths at more than twice the rate (2.2) per mile walking, and nearly twice the rate (1.7) per mile driving or riding in a car.”
Boston’s minority communities are the ones most impacted by injuries and death from cars, and the ones most in need of investment and change to make the streets safer and more accessible. Unfortunately, the city has dragged its feet in making those investments, often in the name of ‘community engagement,’ even though Boston’s citizens usually support them.
Progress in reducing traffic violence in Boston has also varied by neighborhood. Mattapan was one of just three neighborhoods to see an increase (+9%) in total crashes across all modes over the last decade, along with Brighton (+2%) and the Seaport (+60%, largely because it didn’t really exist in 2015). Dorchester saw a decrease (-12%), but it lagged behind the city as a whole (-17%), as did downtown, Eastie, JP, and Roslindale. Roxbury saw a significant reduction (-25%), as have most other neighborhoods, with the South End saw the largest reduction (-37%).
While traffic engineers, urban planners, and politicians have known about the disparities in traffic violence for years, they’ve often been slow to make meaningful changes to improve safety. One road in Boston lays bare the consequences of this inaction.
Death and delay on Hyde Park Avenue
Hyde Park Avenue runs for roughly 4.5 miles from Wolcott Square near Dedham and the Great Blue Hill along the rail lines until it ends at Forest Hills. While the size varies, it is almost always 4 lanes, often with parking on both sides, and is semi-divided for much of its length. A key thoroughfare, it is also among the most dangerous, and in 2025, it had the 3rd most pedestrian crashes and 6th most car crashes among all roads in Boston. Recognizing that the road is a critical corridor for cars, buses, and pedestrians, Boston sought to redesign Hyde Park Ave. to make it safer and more pleasant for all users. This began in 2019 with public outreach to discuss options. Despite the critical need for changes, the project has stagnated. Over the next six years, the city vacillated between promises of change and further public engagement. In August of 2025, Mayor Wu refused to incorporate moderate safety changes overwhelmingly supported by the community, citing ‘stakeholder outreach.’ In April of 2026, Mayor Wu personally attended one of the countless community forums on the issue, saying that safety improvements were necessary, but that it would take longer, and that the community just needed more patience: “I do think that engagement and communication have been a place where we haven’t gotten it right all the way over the last four years, and I want to make sure that we’re doing it better and in a different way the next four years.” A remarkable statement given the four years of inaction under her administration and in the aftermath of a thumping electoral victory, giving her a broad mandate to govern. One wonders how much more ‘communication’ and ‘engagement’ is needed before making life-saving safety changes.
As a part of Vision Zero, Boston has a ‘Safety Concerns’ dashboard, where residents can submit concerns about issues with street design and traffic behavior. In April of 2025, a resident submitted a complaint about the intersection of Hyde Park Ave. and American Legion Highway, saying:
“Most drivers at this intersection ignore traffic signals and signs, even in areas with clear visibility—not blind corners—where pedestrians are plainly visible. Despite this, drivers routinely speed up instead of stopping for crosswalks, cutting off pedestrians mid-crossing. This dangerous behavior is rampant.”
On September 28, 2025, a pedestrian was hit and killed by a car at that intersection, the second of three killed in Boston in three weeks.
At the time of publication, the website for the Hyde Park Ave. redesign states: “We are continuing targeted outreach with the goal of presenting concepts in Fall 2025.”
Solutions
Vision Zero was a promise to the people of Boston: a vow that death and destruction on Boston’s roads would end. It isn’t an impossible promise — Boston has made some progress since starting, and other cities have shown what’s achievable. But complacency from our leaders risks the wins we have made as our roads are once again growing more dangerous for pedestrians. The people of Boston do not need more platitudes or equivocation about the difficulties of ‘stakeholder engagement.’ We need real change before more lives become just another row in a spreadsheet.
What can we do? For one — stop delaying improvements. Mayor Wu needs to not meddle with existing winning projects that improve safety and traffic flow. The DoT and other city agencies need to get out of their own way and execute on projects, lest they lose further federal funding because they can’t execute. The biggest success in reducing traffic violence has been with cyclists, and that’s come about because of thoughtful safety projects that have made the city better for people using all modes of transit. We need infrastructure, and there is no reason to sit on our hands for years at a time. More than ever, people want the government to just do things. Mayor Wu has a mandate and needs to use it.
Enforce the laws. There are intersections in Boston where a single cop writing red light tickets could probably single-handedly close the budget deficit. Police should be doing their jobs and the government should stand behind them in enforcing dangerous driving laws. Councillors are fond of proposing more laws and regulations, but it is meaningless if there is no enforcement of them. It’s already illegal to run a red light, let’s actually do something about it. If we don’t want cops on the streets, let’s use cameras, which are proven to save lives and improve safety.
Scrap concurrent pedestrian signaling at our busiest intersections. The practice of having pedestrians cross at intersections when parallel-running traffic also has a green is risky, particularly in dense areas. I live near a busy 4-way intersection with concurrent signaling that is extremely dangerous, especially as drivers rush to make turns into people crossing. We should not have concurrent signaling in areas with heavy pedestrian traffic, which would improve safety and reduce driver frustration. And maybe, like NYC, we can eliminate right-on-reds too.
Look at policies like a congestion zone. Reducing the number of cars on the road and making transit more viable will reduce deaths and injuries for everyone, and have a bevy of positive spillover effects. Boston is already a viable, walkable city and we should leverage that strength by designing it for people, not just cars.
Although many of the trends in policing began to shift years prior, you need to look at the killings of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and others to more fully grasp the change.
Or 10, or 8. Mass Ave. at Melnea Cass could be called either Roxbury or the South End. American Legion Highway at Walk Hill could also be Roslindale. You get the gist, though.
This is an imperfect measure, to be sure. There’s an argument for using area, total road length, or some better estimation of real-time pedestrian count. But this was among the cleanest and uses well-sourced data.
There have been three fatalities on the block of Albany St. where BUSPH is located since 2015