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http://www.newsday.com/services/newspaper/printedition/sunday/lilife/ny-lilirr186075544mar22,0,2214236.story?page=2BY ALFONSO A. CASTILLO
alfonso.castillo@newsday.com
March 22, 2009
If anyone would feel strongly about the need to replace all of the Long Island Rail Road's nearly 300 grade crossings, you might think it would be Robert Lindon.
Twenty-seven years ago, Lindon's daughter, Stacie, was one of 10 teenagers returning from a party in a Ford van when its driver tried to beat an oncoming train as it approached the Herricks Avenue crossing in Mineola. Stacie Lindon, 19, and eight others inside the van were fatally crushed by the speeding train in what remains the deadliest grade-crossing accident in the LIRR's history.
While still feeling the anguish of losing his daughter, even Lindon, 80, knows that the elimination of grade crossings, as dangerous as they are, just isn't feasible.
"I'd certainly like to see more of them eliminated, but, realistically, the cost of replacing them or changing them is astronomical " said Lindon, formerly of Garden City and now living in Palm Beach, Fla.
Lindon, along with his wife, Joan, lobbied to have the Herricks crossing replaced with a bridge. That bridge, under which the road passes, was built in 1998 at a cost of $85 million.
And so, even after two LIRR accidents at grade crossings in the span of about 24 hours in February injured eight people and killed an 86-year-old man, the perilous system that allows motorists, pedestrians and trains to share the same tracks is not going away any time soon.
Deadly numbers
From 1999 to 2008, 83 accidents involving trains at grade crossings took place on the LIRR, resulting in 25 deaths, according to the Federal Railroad Administration. Nationally, there were 2,752 accidents on 227,000 grade crossings in 2007, resulting in 338 deaths. That's down from 2,937 accidents resulting in 369 deaths the previous year. The 2007 nationwide crossing fatalities also are down 70 percent from a high of 1,115 in 1976, according to the FRA.
The majority of accidents involve pedestrians or drivers disregarding safety features at crossings, according to the railroad administration.
" Long Island is littered with grade crossings, unfortunately," Mitchell Pally of Stony Brook, a board member of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and commissioner of its Long Island Committee, said of the LIRR's 295 crossings. "We are, to some degree, dependent on the equipment that is there and the ability of the public to understand the danger of grade crossings."
Michael Grande, 86, was killed in Syosset on Feb. 13 when his car drove onto the tracks at the Robbins Lane crossing and was struck by an eastbound train that could have been traveling up to 80 miles per hour. MTA, state and federal investigators are trying to find out what caused one of the crossing gates to partially rise for 2.5 seconds as the train approached.
Pushing for adaptation
Rather than doing away with crossings, experts advocate for the "Three E's" of grade crossing safety: education, enforcement and engineering.
Leading the education effort is Operation Lifesaver, a national nonprofit that informs pedestrians and drivers on how to safely coexist with railroad crossings. In seminars the group also urges police to aggressively ticket motorists and pedestrians who maneuver through lowered gates at crossings, said Operation Lifesaver's New York State coordinator, Evan Eisenhandler. The MTA police say they handed out 1,967 tickets in 2008 for crossing violations to both drivers and pedestrians.
But, Eisenhandler said, the "only truly safe crossing" is one that has been eliminated.
Although the crossings are owned, operated and maintained by the LIRR, the decision to improve or replace them with overpass bridges usually comes from the state Department of Transportation. But the complexity and high price tag of such projects have kept most of them on the drawing board.
Since the 1998 closing of the Herricks Avenue crossing - once called the most dangerous in the country by the National Transportation Safety Board - the DOT has replaced one more crossing with a bridge under which cars travel. After four years and $24 million, the Roslyn Road crossing replacement project in Mineola was completed in January. The department also recently completed roadwork and sign improvement projects at the Willis Avenue and Main Street crossings in Mineola.
No new bridges in the works
DOT spokeswoman Jennifer Post said the department has no immediate plans for other closure projects but is taking on 25 "safety improvement projects" at crossings. She said 83 locations have been improved over the last dozen years.
The LIRR has considered its own crossing closure projects, including some of the system's most dangerous along New Hyde Park Road, as part of the stalled plan to build a third track on the main line. But no such projects are in the works. LIRR president Helena Williams said the responsibility to replace the crossings with bridges falls on the DOT largely because the LIRR "was there first."
"We were on Long Island before many communities grew, Williams said. "Communities developed and roads were built, and they had to accommodate for the fact that there were already railroad tracks there."
Williams said the LIRR concentrates its efforts on maximizing the safety of each crossing, through regular inspections and the improvement of gates, lights and train horns. Williams said the LIRR also educates pedestrians and drivers through its TRACKS (Together Railroads and Communities Keeping Safe) program.
Even if most accidents involve pedestrians or drivers taking unnecessary risks, Lindon said, "if the train was not there or had been elevated, the accident would never have occurred."
Issuing blame, Lindon said, doesn't make the pain go away - even three decades later. "You can't go through that and not have it hurt forever," he said.
