And yet, year after year, that contract is broken, sometimes with catastrophic consequences.

As a personal injury law firm that has represented pedestrians, cyclists, and e-bike riders across the Commonwealth, we’ve come to see the crosswalk not as a symbol of safety, but as one of the most contested and dangerous few square feet of pavement in modern life. This isn’t hyperbole. It’s what the data and our caseload tells us.

A Deadly Year on Massachusetts Streets

In 2025, Massachusetts recorded 354 traffic fatalities statewide. Of those, at least 76 were pedestrians — meaning roughly one in every five traffic deaths in the state involved someone simply trying to cross the street or walk along a road. That figure comes from WalkMassachusetts’ fifth annual report on fatal pedestrian crashes, which draws directly from MassDOT crash data.

To put that in perspective: this isn’t a rare, freak occurrence. It’s a pattern so consistent that advocacy groups have tracked it annually for half a decade.

The 76 pedestrian deaths in 2025 were roughly in line with the 78 recorded in 2024, and while that’s down from the grim high of 101 deaths in 2022, it’s nowhere close to “safe.”

A few details from the most recent data stand out as especially important for anyone who walks, drives, or bikes in Massachusetts:

• Speed is the common thread. Traffic safety advocates point to one factor that shows up again and again in fatal crashes: excessive vehicle speed. Roughly 70% of pedestrian fatalities occur on roads with posted speed limits between 25 and 35 mph, the ordinary streets we cross every day.
• Darkness is deadly. Close to 69% of fatal pedestrian crashes happen after dark, when visibility is reduced.
• Older adults are disproportionately at risk. Adults 65 and older made up roughly 43% of pedestrian fatalities in 2025, despite representing under 20% of the state’s population, a disparity that has held for five consecutive years of reporting.
• Boston’s injury numbers are climbing. Pedestrian injuries in Boston alone rose from 465 in 2024 to 571 in 2025, even as the city continues to invest in safety redesigns.

These aren’t just statistics on a spreadsheet. Each number represents a person who left their house expecting to come home, but instead became part of a preventable tragedy.

It’s Not Just Cars: The Rise of E-Bike and Scooter Crashes

For decades, the pedestrian safety conversation focused almost entirely on cars. That’s no longer the whole picture. Micromobility (e-bikes, e-scooters) has exploded in popularity across Massachusetts, and crosswalks have become a flashpoint for a new category of collision.

MassDOT’s IMPACT crash data shows nearly 900 crashes involving e-bikes and e-scooters between 2023 and 2025 alone. Nationally, the trend is even starker: emergency department visits tied to micromobility crashes climbed from roughly 37,300 in 2017 to more than 149,000 in 2024 (a jump of about 300%), with related fatalities rising from just five in 2017 to 135 in 2024, according to Consumer Product Safety Commission data.

Massachusetts has seen this play out in tragic, specific incidents. In 2025, a pedestrian struck by an e-bike near Copley Square in Boston later died from his injuries, a case that has since become a flashpoint in local debates over micromobility regulation. In the first half of 2026 alone, multiple serious e-bike and e-scooter crashes involving teenage riders required medical helicopter transport to regional trauma centers.

Part of the danger lies in ambiguity. Under Massachusetts law, e-bikes and e-scooters are legally vehicles, subject to registration and inspection requirements, and their operators must yield to pedestrians in crosswalks. However, enforcement and public understanding of these rules lag behind the devices’ surge in popularity. Riders often reach speeds that outpace what pedestrians or drivers expect from something that looks like a bicycle, and many riders (especially younger ones) lack the experience to handle that speed safely. The result is a growing category of crosswalk collisions that doesn’t fit neatly into the “driver vs. pedestrian” framework our laws were originally built around.

Why the Crosswalk Itself Can Be the Problem

It’s tempting to think of crosswalk collisions purely as a matter of individual negligence caused by a distracted driver, a jaywalking pedestrian, or a reckless scooter rider. But a closer look at Massachusetts crash data suggests something more structural is often at play: street design itself.

Massachusetts stands out nationally in an important way as it has one of the highest proportions of urban fatal crashes of any state, largely because so much of the Commonwealth’s population and street grid is concentrated in dense, older cities never designed for modern traffic volumes or speeds. Many crosswalks sit on roads with wide lanes, minimal lighting, and long, unprotected crossing distances — all factors that research consistently links to more severe outcomes when a crash does occur.

This is precisely why the state’s most effective safety interventions haven’t focused on driver education alone. They’ve focused on physically redesigning the street.

What Massachusetts Is Doing About It

To its credit, the Commonwealth isn’t ignoring this problem. Several coordinated efforts are underway at the state and municipal level:

MassDOT’s Complete Streets Funding Program continues to award grants — often $500,000 or more per project — to cities and towns for infrastructure like new crosswalks, curb extensions, ADA-compliant ramps, flashing pedestrian beacons, and improved street lighting. Recent recipients have used this funding to shrink dangerous intersections, add raised and high-visibility crosswalks, and shorten the distance pedestrians must travel to cross safely.

The Boston Region Vision Zero Action Plan, endorsed by the Boston Region Metropolitan Planning Organization in March 2026, commits 97 municipalities in the greater Boston area to a shared goal: eliminating fatal and serious-injury crashes entirely by 2050. The plan is built around a public data dashboard that lets individual communities identify their own high-risk corridors and target interventions accordingly, rather than applying one-size-fits-all fixes.

Somerville has become something of a proof of concept. After adopting Vision Zero principles in 2017, the city reported zero traffic fatalities for three consecutive years and a 50% decline in serious-injury crashes. Its approach hasn’t relied on a single dramatic fix rather, proven tools such as raised crosswalks that physically force drivers to slow down, curb bump-outs that shorten crossing distances, and redesigned intersections along historically dangerous corridors like Mystic Avenue and McGrath Highway.

MassDOT’s public education materials now specifically address crosswalk design for drivers, explaining features like curb bump-outs and “shark’s teeth” markings that indicate where vehicles must stop, an acknowledgment that many crashes stem not from malice, but from drivers simply not recognizing or understanding crosswalk infrastructure.

These efforts represent real progress. But progress is not the same as safety, and the pace of infrastructure change is, by design, slow. A single intersection redesign can take years to fund, approve, and construct. In the meantime, people are still crossing dangerous streets every single day.

What This Means If You’ve Been Hurt in a Crosswalk

If you or someone you love has been struck by a vehicle, e-bike, or scooter while using a crosswalk, it’s natural to assume the law was clearly on your side and that fault will be simple to establish. In practice, these cases are often more complicated than they appear.

Insurance companies frequently attempt to shift blame onto the injured pedestrian, arguing about walk signal timing, visibility, or whether the pedestrian was fully within the marked lines. E-bike and scooter cases raise additional questions about liability — was the device owned by the rider, a rental company, or a delivery platform? Was the rider operating within the legal speed and class restrictions for their vehicle? These are exactly the kinds of factual disputes that determine whether an injured person receives fair compensation for medical bills, lost wages, and pain and suffering — or walks away with nothing.

Understanding your rights starts with understanding how these crashes actually happen — and, as the data shows, they happen more often, and in more varied ways, than most people realize. If you’ve been injured in a crosswalk or know someone who has, consult with the legal experts at Marcotte Law Firm, Merrimack Valley’s leading personal injury law firm.

This article is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.