Jeff Smith wrote:9 crossings identified on Upper Harlem electric territoy:
-White Plains: Virginia Rd. (Rank: 3. Difficult to eliminate; major thoroughfare).
-Valhalla: Cleveland St (rank: 11; should be closed - nearby overhead bridge); Commerce St (rank: should be reconfigured; overpass possible?); Lakeview Av (rank: 7; difficult due to proximity of stone businesses; they'd have to be relo'd for a bridge)
-Hawthorne: Stevens (aka Gates of Heaven; rank: 4; difficult due to proximity of main cemetery office)
-Katonah: Jay St. (rank: 1. Impossible to eliminate/close. Right downtown. Quad gates?)
-Mt. Kisco: Green Ln. (rank: 6; is this Reader's Digest? If it is, people actually DRIVE onto the train tracks here because their GPS said so.)
-Chappaqua: Roaring Brook (rank: 10; actually, I think THIS is Reader's Digest; plenty of room for a bridge it looks like).
-Brewster: (Rank: 14. not sure what this road is, but if I have the crossing right, it's right by the train station. Unlikely closure/reconfigure candidate).
I could see Green Ln. being closeable. Saw Mill's got proper interchanges to both parkway directions 1 mile to the south and 1 mile to the north. There's no reason to have one of those deathtrap unidirectional "T" side street intersections there. I would be too scared to take that shortcut with the better options so close.
Not sure why Commerce St. is needed either. If they made Wall St. a thru street by the cemetery garage it's 1/2 mile and a right-turn onto Lakeview to make exactly the same move. At a nice, good-sightline perpendicular angle to both the parkway and the tracks instead of that crazy bad-angle S-curve where you can't see anything at all. That is one of the dumber parkway intersections still in existence.
Including the Cleveland St. rec, that's a third of them at no cost other than some pavement through a dirt pit and maybe a short-cycle traffic light at Wall/Lakeview.
Still think Ellen Ave./Brewster Hwy. is one of the dumber ones. It only exists so the townies can freeload free station parking and the crossing geometry is so horrible I'm not even sure a 3 MPH collision 8 feet from the station platform is preventable. There are exactly 2 homes at the top of the hill, long driveways meeting at the center where the dirt lots are. I can't imagine they'd be at any loss of means to string those driveways together the final 400 ft. to the Hillsdale Terrace cul de sac then sell the muddy dirt lots for 2 or 3 more houses.
"But don't you dare take away my free parking!", says the hamlet. So slow-speed demolition derby it will continue to be. What I said about these locals still not being ready to have this conversation.
That's a coulda/shoulda 4th elimination which would completely separate from Jay St. Katonah to NY 312 Dykemans, 13 miles.
The rest? W. Stevens is so low-volume only having the cemetery office that it's least concern. Jay St. is a concern, but the hardest of 'em all to solve and probably infeasible. Lakeview is at least a
well-designed parkway intersection with lots more queue length than the others. Low concern.
So...you do what you can with Virginia and Roaring Brook. Virginia is absolutely wretched. Horrible angle, on a hill, narrow as hell. Elimination infeasible, but they definitely have to do some sort of major-league reconfig to get that crossing perpendicular and at level grade. Roaring Brook is probably the best outright cost-effective elimination candidate since the tracks are in a dip with gentle hills on both sides. Fill + overpass.
That leaves:
-- Blown-up and reconfigured Virginia Rd.
-- Lakeview Ave. (quad gates)
-- (probably) W. Stevens
-- Jay St. (quad gates AND advance warning doodads)
-- (probably) Brewster free parking, and a lot of screaming before conceding that one.
Not bad. Better if you could hold the line on closing Brewster and get this list cut in half, because that would give you the 13 mi. gap north of Jay, and a 13 mi. gap south of Jay to W. Stevens and Lakeview. They could totally live with that.
But...residents concerned today about safety will jealously guard their shortcuts tomorrow. That's why most RR's have so many lingering superfluous or outright duplicate crossings that SHOULD be straight-up jersey barriered to no one's loss and some town's emergency liability's gain...but can't, because that would be starting World War III. So it goes.