Fifteen pedestrians and cyclists were hit by cars on Concord streets in 2025, the most in any single year since 2019, according to an analysis of police crash data published Tuesday, Aug. 4, by The Concord Bridge.
The spike is concentrated around Concord Center, where the town's busiest walking and biking corridors converge. Town officials are preparing a Transportation Strategy Plan that could reshape how those streets protect people on foot and on two wheels.
The numbers
The Concord Bridge reviewed 76 pedestrian and bicycle collisions with motor vehicles recorded by Concord police from January 2019 through May 2026. Over that span, the town averaged about nine such crashes per year, with a low of seven in 2020. The 2025 total nearly doubled that average.
Bicycle crashes drove the increase: nine of the 15 collisions in 2025 involved cyclists, compared with six involving pedestrians. Through the first five months of 2026, police had already recorded seven incidents, four involving bikes, nearly matching full-year totals from 2020, 2022 and 2024.
More than half of pedestrian-car injury crashes during the period were classified as serious or fatal, compared with 8% of bicycle-car injury crashes and about 4.6% of vehicle-only crashes.
One collision proved fatal. In August 2020, Jennifer "Jamie" Bemis, founder of the Concord nonprofit farm Gaining Ground, died after being struck by a 91-year-old driver while walking at the intersection of Main and Thoreau streets.
Hotspots in the center
The data points to a tight cluster of danger zones. The Main Street and Walden Street intersection recorded eight of the 76 crashes, the most of any single location. Sudbury Road and Walden Street followed. The intersection of Thoreau Street and Sudbury Road saw three crashes, two of them in 2025.
A late-2024 redesign of the Main/Walden intersection, funded by a nearly $198,000 MassDOT Shared Streets and Spaces grant, has eliminated pedestrian collisions there. But three bicycle "dooring" incidents have occurred since the renovation.
"The whole idea was to give the pedestrians a safe zone to be able to get out and cross the street when they redid the intersection," Concord Police Capt. Brian Goldman said in a July 24 Concord Bridge report on the redesign. "It seems to have worked."
What comes next
Phil Posner, a cyclist and member of the Transportation Advisory Committee, pointed to the tight geometry of Concord Center as a persistent hazard.
"When you come to Concord Center, there's just not enough room between the sidewalk and the cars parked and the cars on the street," Posner said. "It creates a hard path to navigate."
The town's draft Transportation Strategy Plan identifies Monument Square, Main Street and Sudbury Road as the areas with the highest concentration of pedestrian and bicycle collisions. It recommends redesigning high-priority intersections, expanding the walking network and investing in bicycle infrastructure where space and historic character allow.
Concord communications manager Donna McIntosh said the plan is in draft form, with a final version expected in September. The Transportation Advisory Committee and Select Board will then review it for adoption.
