by F-line to Dudley via Park
Jeff Smith wrote:Semper Fi, thanks for that awesome link to a dispassionate anyalysis. One hates to think that this boils down to basic numbers and economics, but it's a good model.Ironically, Jay St. is one of the 2 electric territory outliers on the Harlem that aren't mere feet from a parkway entrance. And yeah, it is a top-priority one. The street corner right in front of Katonah Station is very built up with sightlines and queue backup potential very dicey. Brewster, the other non-parkway outlier, is also a little nutty with all the haphazard semi-official station parking up the hill on the dirt driveway...total blind corner at the crossing...such a narrow crossing that the only way for an entering SUV to pass an exiting SUV in to go *KA-THUNK* over the tracks with passenger-side wheels off the crossing rubber...and exactly 2 car lengths of space between tracks and busy Route 6 traffic light with merging traffic at the first car length from the small pay lot. That's one where the locals really gotta get real about what's the price of their God-given unalienable right to free hillside parking. Because that one truly is a "drop the jersey barriers and block that sucker off" case where they pay a little to string a driveway linking those two lonely houses to Hillside Terrace or County 36. But I bet if you proposed that it would get shot down in a nanosecond, because free parking. I don't think these communities are ready for a frank and sober discussion of the risks, and which mode carries the larger-by-far share of that risk.
Some interesting snippetsfrom the analysis:
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Authorities knew the crossing had the potential to be hazardous. A predictive model developed by the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) estimated that there was a 3 percent probability of a collision at the site in any given year. That’s the ninth-highest accident probability of any of Metro-North’s 44 rail crossings in New York and ranks higher than 90 percent of the state’s 2,675 crossings.
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...Among commuter-rail crossings, the Islip Avenue crossing in Central Islip on Long Island has the highest probability of a collision at 17.4 percent per year. Compared with those crossings, Metro-North’s aren’t considered particularly risky by the model; the system’s riskiest New York crossing is on Jay Street in Katonah, also in Westchester County, with a collision probability of 4.3 percent. (The railroad has three higher-risk crossings in Connecticut.)
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Which is why NYDOT would be wise to attack the godawful design of those parkway intersections as primary order of business instead of letting the messaging get totally unhinged on another "TRAIN BAD" rant fanned by Rep. Liveshot down in D.C. and/or up in Albany. People are going to keep getting pulled out by the jaws of life at these same locations. It's just the next 49 times out of 50 the only Metro North involvement is going to be the PA announcer at GCT announcing that all trains running north of NWP are running late because of "police activity on the Taconic", Cuomo not making a site visit, Gildebrand not making a statement on C-SPAN, and nobody outside of a handful of Mt. Pleasant Daily Voice subscribers hearing about it in the news. And nobody will put 2 and 2 together, like they haven't put 2 and 2 together for the last half-century. The state-level transportation folks are gonna have to be the initiators on changes with their parkway and its interface with the local grid--asphalt way ahead of steel on the pecking order--because Selectman Pothole and the local voters certainly are not going to make the connection.