Good Places Not to Drive in Cambridge

If you are in a car in Cambridge, the safest place to be is inside your own garage. Once you pull out into the street, you face a better chance than most other Massachusetts motorists of winding up in an accident.

Cambridge residents were involved in a total of 901 traffic accidents in 1979, ten of them fatal. Over 1100 people were injured in collisions which occurred predominantly in three problem areas--Memorial Drive, the Fresh Pond rotaries, and Kendall Square.

Plans for revamping each of these areas are currently in the design state, and should be fully implemented by 1984, George Teso, director of traffic and parking for the city, explained yesterday.

But until then, you'd be wise to avoid the worst corners in Cambridge (listed in the accompanying box).

Unless, of course, you're the type of person that goes to auto races hoping for a 12-car pile-up.

In that case, your best bet would be to camp out at the corner of the Alewife Brook Parkway and the Concord Turnpike. Fifty-eight accidents occurred there in 1979, causing 12 injuries and one death.

The corner of Boylston St. and Memorial Drive by Eliot House is the second most dangerous interchange, with 42 accidents and 13 injuries.

And the Corner of Mass Ave and the Alewife Brook Parkway finishes a close third with 41 accidents and 10 injuries.

Harvard students living in any of the River Houses should walk to the Charles with care. Each of the streets intersecting Memorial Drive, such as Quincy and DeWolfe, placed in the city's top 25 corners for accidents.

When all other factors, such as the individual driver's characteristics, are held equal. Cambridge is "pretty close to the worst" place to drive in Massachusetts, a spokesman for the state's auto insurance division said yesterday.

On a scale of one to 24, with 15 through 24 being reserved for different parts of Boston--the most dangerous city overall--Cambridge gets a rating of 12.

The city's traffic department has not made any "major" structural renovations to dangerous intersections in the last few years, David Bryant, an assistant to Teso, said yesterday.

But Bryant added that the city continually installs new signal lights on the most crowded and dangerous corners.

The improvements planned for Kendall Square, Fresh Pond, and the Alewife Brook Parkway, should help the Bay State, long-renowned as the home of the nation's most daring and careless motorists, continue to change its image.

A total of 210,000 accidents and 850 fatalities occurred in Massachusetts in 1979, but those figures represented a 5-per-cent drop from the year before, a spokesman from the Registry of Motor Vehicles said. Ten to Avoid Intersection  Accidents  Injuries 1. Alewife Pkwy and Concord Pike  58  12 2. Boylston St and Memorial Dr  42  13 3. Mass Ave and Alewife Pkwy  41  10 4. Alewife Pkwy and Rindge Ave  36  7 5. Mt Auburn St and Fresh Pond  29  11 6. Mass Ave and Memorial Dr  28  12 7. Western Ave and Memorial Dr  27  8 8. River St and Memorial Dr  27  6 9. Commercial Ave and O'Brien Hwy  27  13 10. Brattle St and Fresh Pond  26  14