A box truck crashed on Interstate 93 near the Braintree Split early Friday morning, splitting in two and coming to rest atop the concrete barriers that mark the entrance to the highway's HOV lane. The driver was trapped in the wreckage and had to be extracted before being taken to a local hospital, with no immediate word available on their condition. Boxes of produce spilled across the roadway, littering the highway and forcing Massachusetts State Police to block off the left two travel lanes as crews worked to clear the scene.
The crash happened shortly before 4 a.m. on northbound I-93 near the HOV lane entrance, according to Massachusetts State Police, as reported by Boston 25 News. The wreckage remained on site for hours as heavy tows were called in to extract the vehicle, and the blocked lanes accommodated the emergency response throughout the morning. Boston 25's Catherine Parrotta provided live traffic updates on the station's morning newscast as the backup grew.
A Commuter Chokepoint Before Rush Hour
The stretch of highway where the truck came to rest is no ordinary shoulder. The I-93 Southeast Expressway HOV zipper lane runs 5.4 miles between Furnace Brook Parkway in Quincy and Morrissey Boulevard in Boston, operating for northbound commuters on weekdays from 5 a.m. to 10 a.m., according to the Massachusetts Department of Transportation. The crash landed just south of that lane's automated entry point, near the Braintree Split interchange, which carries an estimated 250,000 to 275,000 vehicles on a typical weekday, per Wikipedia's account of the interchange, making it one of the most heavily traveled bottlenecks in the state. A blockage there just before the morning commute ramps up was always going to ripple outward across the South Shore.
MassDOT's HOV lane depends on specialized barrier transfer vehicles, known as zipper trucks, that physically relocate the concrete barriers twice a day to reconfigure lane capacity between the morning and evening commutes, a system the agency has described as a cost-effective alternative to widening the highway outright. The southern entrance to the lane in Quincy is also equipped with automated solar-powered SwiftGates and SwiftSigns designed to control entry and warn drivers during lane deployments and emergency closures, according to a description of the system from Versilis, the infrastructure firm behind the installation. Damage to that barrier system from a crash like Friday's can complicate the lane's normal twice-daily reconfiguration, adding another layer to the cleanup beyond simply hauling away the wreckage.
What Isn't Known Yet
Massachusetts State Police have not said what caused the truck to split apart and mount the barriers, and the driver's condition following extraction from the wreckage has not been released. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration research has found that traveling too fast for existing roadway conditions, such as wet pavement or dense pre-dawn traffic, is a critical factor in roughly 23 percent of commercial truck crashes nationwide, though that research offers general context rather than an explanation specific to Friday's incident. Under Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 90, Section 26, drivers involved in crashes causing injury or more than $1,000 in property damage are required to file an operator report with the Registry of Motor Vehicles within five days, a requirement that would apply once the driver's condition allows.
Commercial truck safety has drawn heightened attention across the state this year. In July, the Massachusetts State Police Commercial Vehicle Enforcement Section joined Rhode Island State Police for a 12-hour inspection operation along Route 146, checking 126 commercial vehicles and placing 30 unsafe trucks and 20 drivers out of service, according to Massachusetts State Police, who identified 212 total safety violations during that operation. Statewide, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration data for 2024 recorded 2,150 commercial vehicle crashes in Massachusetts, with Fridays accounting for 357 of those incidents, or 16.6 percent of the annual total, even as weekday commercial crashes in the state tend to peak Tuesday through Thursday.
A Familiar Trouble Spot
This is not the first time the area around the Braintree Split has drawn emergency crews. In January 2024, a high-speed police pursuit that began in Quincy ended near the split when suspects in an alleged drug trafficking operation rear-ended another vehicle, a crash Hoodline previously covered that ended with two arrests and a firearm recovered at the scene. The interchange, informally still thought of by many drivers as the start of Route 128 even though the official designation was truncated to Canton back in 1997, continues to function as one of the region's most consequential highway junctions, tying together I-93, U.S. Route 1 and Route 3 near the Braintree-Quincy line.
For now, the immediate priority remains clearing the wreckage and restoring the HOV lane to its normal operating schedule ahead of future morning commutes. No further details on the crash's cause, the extent of barrier damage, or the driver's condition had been released as of Friday morning.
