Recent motor vehicle fatalities lie within same stretch of Route 6

This week, three people died in two separate motor vehicle accidents that occurred along Route 6 between Reed Road and the Dartmouth-Westport border.

On Friday, July 10, 34-year-old Tristan Bedient of Acushnet and 51-year-old Kate Aldrich of New Bedford died in a head-on collision that occurred at the Dartmouth-Westport line.

Just three days later on July 13, 74-year-old cyclist Denise Olson of Westport died when she and a dump truck collided near the Reed Road intersection while she was cycling.

Head-on collision

Around 7:35 p.m. on July 10, Dartmouth Police and Fire District 3 responded to the scene of a head-on collision between a Toyota Camry Sedan and a SAAB sedan at the Dartmouth-Westport Line.

The Toyota Camry Sedan was located with “catastrophic” damage, according to the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office.

Bedient, who had been driving the camry, and Aldrich, who had been his passenger, were brought to a nearby hospital, where they were both pronounced dead a short time later. The people in the SAAB sedan sustained non-life threatening injuries.

Bicycle-dump truck collision

Around 11:35 a.m. on July 13, Dartmouth and Massachusetts State Police officers were dispatched to the area of 832 State Road near Reed Road after receiving a 911 phone call.

When the officers arrived, they located a dump truck pulled over to the right side of the road. The dump truck operator remained on the scene and cooperated with officers. Olson was pronounced dead at the scene.

While there aren’t any dedicated bicycle facilities along Route 6, such as bike lanes or off-road bike paths, biking is allowed along the roadway, though cyclists must ride on the shoulder.

The investigations for both incidents are ongoing, and as of the time of print, no additional information is available.

Dangers of Route 6

Bedient, Aldrich and Olson’s deaths bring the total number of motor vehicle fatalities along Route 6 in Dartmouth to 10 since 2015, according to crash data from the MassDOT Crash Data Portal. All 10 fatalities occurred west of Cross Road and are a combination of passenger, operator, pedestrian and cyclist deaths.

Will Gardner, a member of SouthCoast Places for People's Route 6 Working Group, said that Route 6 is trying to do two things at once, both of which it does “horribly.”

“It’s that combination, trying to both be a street … where people come together where there’s lots of different purposes and lots of life and vibrancy,” he said, “And in a combination of a road, which is a way to get from point A to point B quickly and efficiently.”

The Route 6 Working Group formed a year ago following two fatal motor vehicle crashes that occurred on the New Bedford-Fairhaven Bridge and in Fairhaven within days of each other. The group, made up of South Coast residents, works to find ways to make Route 6 safer for everyone who uses the roadway.

Gardner noted that the corridor is designed using highway design principles and to allow for high speeds while also going through commercial areas and areas where “there’s a lot of complexity and a lot of life.”

Gardner said he doesn’t want to oversimplify the causes of accidents along Route 6, noting that “every one is different,” though he said that in a lot of areas along Route 6 a big challenge is the fact that the road is built like a highway.

“That often induces speeding and high speeds,” he said. “It doesn’t take much for a crash to be fatal, so high speeds can even mean 35 miles an hour, 40 miles an hour.”

Gardner noted that many portions of Route 6 are inherited designs from the 1940s and 50s, created at a time when people could have had a different vision for the roadway or a different set of values.

He said that portions of Route 6 in Dartmouth are some of the worst conditions, both in terms of the safety of the roadway, its overbuilt nature and the economic impact.

“Dartmouth has really borne the brunt of some of these overbuilt designs where so much traffic throughout Dartmouth is now dumped onto this one arterial in Route 6,” he said.