At 7:33 Friday morning, Chelsea fire, police and an ambulance were sent to the McDonald’s at 170 Revere Beach Parkway for a pedestrian struck in the parking lot. Police reported one person on the ground. Seven minutes later the ambulance left for CHA Everett. That is everything that is publicly known. The police department has not issued a statement, and no news outlet picked it up.
A person hit by a car in a fast-food parking lot at breakfast time is, in most places, not a story. On Revere Beach Parkway it is part of a long one.
The road
Route 16 through Chelsea and Everett is a six-lane arterial that was designed as a parkway more than a century ago, built between 1896 and 1904 as a scenic route to the beach. It now carries between 38,000 and 70,000 vehicles a day depending on the stretch, with trucks making up 3 to 5 percent of that and 12 percent near Second Street, where the industrial lots are. The state Department of Conservation and Recreation owned it for most of its life. In 2017 it was handed to MassDOT, which is why complaints about it now go to a highway agency rather than a parks agency.
The regional planning agency studied the Chelsea and Everett stretch in 2019 and the numbers are worth having in front of you. Over five years, 2012 through 2016, there were 657 crashes on the corridor. Twenty-six involved pedestrians and six involved cyclists. About 35 percent produced injuries. Five intersections ranked among the state’s 200 worst crash locations, and seven were designated crash clusters under the federal safety program, including a pedestrian crash cluster at Washington Avenue. Nobody died in that five-year window. In August 2022 a 53-year-old Chelsea man, Oscar Portillo, was killed crossing the westbound side at Vine Street, on the Everett end, and died at the same hospital Friday’s victim was taken to.
What was supposed to happen
The 2019 study recommended the usual list: retimed and coordinated signals, countdown pedestrian heads and crosswalks where they are missing, new wheelchair ramps, replacement of old signal equipment, and multi-use paths so that people walking or biking to the casino or the mall are not sharing the shoulder with 50,000 cars. MassDOT was already committed to rebuilding several Route 16 intersections as part of the Encore casino mitigation package, including Everett Avenue, Union Street, Washington Avenue and Webster and Garfield Avenues.
Some of that work has been done. Some of it is still on paper. The state’s own 2019 description of the walk from Chelsea to Encore called the sidewalk and crosswalk conditions “poor” and the route unsafe, and the planning agency is now in the design phase of a separate greenway to get people off the parkway entirely. Design runs through 2027.
The parking lots
Friday’s crash was in a private lot, not on the roadway, and that matters for who is responsible and for whether it shows up in the state’s crash data at all. The commercial strip along the parkway, the McDonald’s, the gas stations, the plaza entrances, is built around curb cuts that feed directly onto a six-lane road. Drivers pulling in are still moving at parkway speed. Drivers pulling out are watching traffic, not the sidewalk. Pedestrians cutting across a lot to reach a bus stop or a storefront are in the one place nobody is looking.
WalkMassachusetts’ list of pedestrian deaths in Chelsea over the last four years has none on Route 16. They were on Second Street, Bellingham Street and Crescent Avenue. That is either evidence that the parkway is safer than it looks or evidence that the worst outcomes have been luck. The 2019 numbers say it is the second.
If the person hurt Friday morning was seriously injured, the police department will presumably say so. If you saw what happened, Chelsea Police can be reached at their business line, and this newsroom can be reached at [email protected].