Waltham’s traffic accidents in 2025

Waltham had 1,216 reported traffic accidents between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, 2025, according to preliminary data in the state’s Impact database.

The Massachusetts Department of Transportation maintains records of traffic accidents across the state, with detailed information about each accident’s location, impact and severity. 

However, Impact data dashboards are not complete, and MassDOT says on its website that data about crashes after 2022 are considered open so information about them is incomplete and may still change.

Locations with the most crashes

The streets with the highest crash rates in Waltham were all roads that serve as major arteries and are long, with a lot of area for possible crashes. 

The road with the highest rate of accidents was Main Street, with 163 occurring on the road or at its intersections. Many of the crashes on Main Street happened around the city center, with about two-thirds occurring between Linden Street and Weston Street. 

Transportation officials had identified Main Street as an area of significant traffic concern: It was the site of more than half of the intersections listed in MassDOT’s assessment of Waltham’s top accident locations between 2012 and 2021.

Route 128 trailed closely behind Main Street, with 148 accidents reported on the highway or at its exit ramps — although seven of the Route 128 accidents reported in Waltham were technically outside the city’s borders, and seven more were recorded on 128 without a specific location or coordinates. 

Lexington Street also had a high number of accidents, with 129 recorded on the street or at its intersections.

These three streets —- Lexington, Main and Route 128 — saw significantly higher accident rates than other roads in the city.

Moody Street, the next front-runner, had 67 accidents over the course of the year. Other streets with comparatively high accident rates were Beaver Street, Trapelo Road, Newton Street and Weston Street.

Many of the accidents listed in the dataset occurred on roads that serve as the dividing point for multiple wards. In calculating the number of accidents in each ward, The Waltham Times counted accidents located on these roads within 50 feet of a ward border twice, once in each ward they bordered.

Using that criteria, Waltham’s Ward 1–1 and 5–2 had the highest accident tallies in the city in 2025. Ward 1’s first precinct had 204 accidents in it or along its borders, and Ward 5’s second precinct had 230. 

Those numbers can be partially attributed to the fact that both of these wards have long borders along Main Street. Their neighbors across the street — Wards 7–1, 6–1 and 6–2 — also had significant accident volumes. A large proportion of the accidents in Ward 1–1 and Ward 3–1 also  came from Route 128, which travels through the middle of both wards.

Type and severity

In 2025 Waltham didn’t have any car crashes that resulted in fatalities, but 15 serious injuries from traffic accidents have been confirmed so far. State reporting guidelines define “serious injuries” as nonfatal injuries that involve factors such as significant blood loss, head or chest trauma, serious crushing or burning damage, unconsciousness or paralysis.

This is in line with 2024’s numbers, when Waltham saw 13 serious injuries and one death. 

It’s difficult to compare numbers from further back. The state’s Safety Performance Dashboard, which draws its information from federal highway fatality data and the RMV Crash Data System, reports extremely high numbers of serious injuries between 2019 and 2023. A spokesperson from the Waltham Police Department told The Waltham Times those numbers appear to be erroneous and may be the result of a change in the system for reporting injuries during that period.

About 77% of accidents in Waltham in 2025 resulted in no injury at all, with 167, or about 14%, causing minor injuries. Crashes in all other cases either caused only possible injuries or the state does not have information on whether they caused injury.

According to the state’s Safety Performance Dashboard, 25 of the 27 accidents involving pedestrians in Waltham in 2025 resulted in injury. Five resulted in serious injuries, meaning that pedestrians made up a third of the serious injuries reported from crashes in Waltham so far in the past year. 

All of the 19 crashes that involved bicycles resulted in some kind of injury, although none was reported as serious.