Rob Foley wrote:
>
>At least on New York State Department of Transportation roadway
>reconstruction projects, accident data for the project corridor
>is analyzed to reduce and/or eliminate highway incident "hot
>spots". I can't imagine other public agencies doing things any differently.
I can think of three dangerous roads/intersections off the
top of my head, one each in NY, NJ and PA.
The one in PA is a winner that I'm sure many
of us have seen. It's the US-22 / 422(?) interchange
across the street from the Farm Show complex in Harrisburg,
across from Burger King. Coming down the hill on US-22
and making the right (towards the Farm Show complex),
there's no acceleration lane for some strange reason.
If I wasn't looking through the turn in 1998, I would
have bought it there myself! There was always broken
safety glass on the ground when I've been there, so I can
only assume that others have actually had accidents there
on a regular basis. Driving into that intersection,
you're suckered by the concrete island, traffic light,
and curbing into an assumption that there's an acceleration
ramp on the egress of the turn. Putting that ramp
there is the obvious fix, but maybe every intersection
in PA is like that and I'm the only out-of-state fool
that expected one.
The one in NJ is on County Route 565 in Vernon. There's
a cross road at one point, with stop signs on the cross road
only. The intersection is blind to southbound oncoming traffic
on 565, and many a car turning left across 565 or trying to
cross 565 gets t-boned. When I go to visit my parents' place,
I drive 5 miles out of my way to avoid that intersection.
Everyone laughs at me, but I saw a car go spinning onto
a lawn there after getting creamed in the rear quarter.
A traffic light or 4-way stop sign arrangement could
easily fix this problem, but I'm no traffic engineer.
The one in NY may actually have been fixed after many
years. It was on Rt. 17M just outside the village of
Chester. It was nothing more than an off-camber curve,
but it seemed to launch three or four cars *over* the
guardrail every year. Re-paving with positive banking,
even more arrow signs in the curve, and plenty of
yellow reflectors on the lines seems to have fixed this
one. Back in the 1980's when I was working my way through
college at night, I had to call in accidents on this one
curve too many times.
Three states, one county road, one state road, one US highway,
same problem. My guess is that DOT only looks at the
summaries to find the biggest problem, and all of these
have not made the top of the list yet.
In my opinion, this is where the police have a duty to report
an unsafe road condition to the DOT, much like a Solo-II safety
steward deals with unsafe courses. (Obviously, police
can't shut down a road like the safety steward can
shut down an event.) The engineers may never see these serious
problems until they hit #1 on the list, yet many can be fixed
rather simply.....
-Arthur ("McKamey School lesson saved my car that day" edition.)
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