Woman killed by I-93 manhole cover was on way to work as an art teacher in Milton

The situation you describe is the exact reason that you need to be widening roads and building new ones. That would be a lot of pain now to forestall the thousand cuts and occasional tragedy Boston's present state of infrastructure yields.

Every single one of the people pulling double duty inspecting the drains and manhole covers right now can be top-notch, but it's the previous decades of short-sighted and otherwise bad decision making that will continue to make Boston roads (marginally) less safe than they need to be.

The last time this sort of fatal accident happened was in 04, but in 07 there were also a few instances of metal covers coming off and causing (non fatal) accidents on 128. I remember this because I had just moved up here, and had never heard of such a thing happening anywhere else.

These things aren't happening daily or monthly, or even annually, which makes their actual rate of occurrence hard to pin down beyond anecdotal certainty. And will take decades to be able to tell if a policy or procedural change really helped.

But in lieu of a crystal ball, some things can be inferred from first principles, and the most basic one is that if two "things" happen to a piece of road, each of which has a small chance of causing a fatality in the future, that's twice the probability of a fatality that you'd accumulate from just one "thing".

And these "things" can be obvious like opening the cover to go down it, popping the storm drain to clear it (can't do much about the frequency of those, just need to be more careful), to the non obvious, like sending the salt trucks around with their plows down before any snow piles up (I've seen more than one preventative scraping of bare asphalt on 128 in the hours before a predicted winter event) and the order in which different kinds of work are scheduled.

Sometimes on the scale of decades. When they stopped running trolleys out of Harvard Square, for instance, Belmont just paved over the tracks on the 73 bus route, and after many many seasonal cooling cycles, the tracks just broke up the pavement above them into a pair of ruts the entire length of the road. That little cost saving move to not rip out the tracks the first time around resulted in decades of whole miles of street where safety is lower because drivers look near to avoid immediate obstacles instead of far to see pedestrians,traffic lights, and opposing traffic, AND there's now a bottomless reservoir of small rocks for car tires to kick up and fling wherever. And guess what: the tracks are still rusting down there the whole time, so you still need to take them out at some point. In fact, there's an ongoing round of work on that road that's seen the 73 converted to buses for a few years so that trolleybus wire can be removed to make room for heavy equipment to resurface the road. If the don't rip out the tracks now, they'll need to be just as disruptive again in the future.