Potholes, Rotaries, and Steel Plates: A Boston Rider's Survival Guide
Every Boston rider has a pothole story. The one on the Southeast Expressway that could swallow a front wheel. The frost heave on Route 128 that launches your suspension. The trench patch on Memorial Drive that turns to glass the second it rains. Around here the road itself is the hazard, and a defect a car shrugs off can put a motorcycle on the ground. This is a survival guide for the pavement Boston actually rides on, and a plain-language look at what happens when the road, not another driver, is what put you down.
Why Boston pavement is so brutal
It comes down to freeze and thaw. Water works into every crack, freezes overnight and expands, then thaws by afternoon. Do that a hundred times over a Massachusetts winter and the pavement breaks apart from the inside. By late January the roads are a minefield of potholes, sunken utility cuts, and frost heaves. A car has four wheels and a suspension built to absorb it. You have two contact patches the size of your palm, and a pothole hit at the wrong angle can deflect your front wheel, pinch a tire, bend a rim, or throw you off entirely. Wet weather hides all of it, so ride the cold months assuming every puddle is a crater until you have proof otherwise.
Rotaries, steel plates, and trench patches
New England kept its rotaries long after most of the country tore theirs out, and Boston-area drivers treat them as a contest of nerve. Legally, traffic already in the rotary has the right of way, but in practice drivers merge without looking and cut across your line to reach an exit. Cover your brakes, assume the car at every entrance is coming in whether you are there or not, pick your exit early, and never bet your life on a driver honoring your right of way. Utility work leaves the city stitched together with steel plates and trench patches that sit proud of the pavement, catch a tire, and turn slick when wet or frosted. Cross them upright and square, off the brakes and off the throttle.
- ✓ Photograph the defect right away. Cities patch potholes and utilities reset plates within days. Shoot several angles with something for scale before the evidence disappears.
- ✓ Note the exact location, date, and time. A precise spot and timestamp are what tie the defect to your crash later.
- ✓ Get witness names before they leave. An independent account of the road condition is worth more than your word alone.
- ✓ Mind the 30-day notice deadline. A public-entity road-defect claim requires written notice within 30 days, far shorter than the ordinary three-year deadline.
When the road is the defect
Sometimes the hazard is not another driver. It is a pothole a city knew about and never fixed, a work zone left without warning, or a steel plate that shifted out of place. Massachusetts does let you bring a claim against a city, a town, or the Commonwealth for a defect in a public road, but two rules make these cases hard. First, the deadline: you generally must give written notice of the claim within 30 days of the injury, and missing that window can lose the claim no matter how bad the road was. Second, the cap: Massachusetts limits the damages recoverable for a public road defect to $5,000. The money that actually covers a serious injury usually has to come from somewhere else, a contractor whose work zone was unsafe, a utility that left a plate out of place, or another driver whose conduct combined with the defect. And because PIP does not cover motorcyclists here and the state minimum liability is only 20/40/5, your own uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage is frequently the backstop that pays. Sorting out which source applies while preserving that short deadline is exactly what to get in front of a lawyer about quickly.
Jeff Glassman and the Boston motorcycle accident attorneys at Glassman Injury Lawyers represent riders hurt by negligent drivers. If you have questions after a crash, their team is here to help.