A deadly year on the Southern Parkway

BY TOM MCGINTY | tom.mcginty@newsday.com

August 5, 2007

Even by the treacherous standards of the Southern State Parkway, the human toll during the first 10 weeks of this year was staggering.

A dozen people lost their lives in eight crashes on the meandering, 80-year-old roadway, doubling last year's fatality count before spring.

State Police said unsafe speeds contributed to most of the crashes, including the accident that killed Long Island boxers Darnell Peacock, 20, and Paul McKenzie, 22, and their friend Eric Whitfield, 20. The BMW they were in hit a guardrail, went airborne and smashed into the Grand Avenue overpass at 4:38 a.m. on Feb. 4.

But tattoo artist Joseph Vincuillo was the victim of a rear-end collision, the most common type of accident on the Southern State, according to state DOT statistics. As the 20-year-old from Lindenhurst changed lanes during the evening rush hour on Feb. 6, a minivan struck the back of his 1999 Mazda. Vincuillo's car veered across the parkway's grass median and into oncoming traffic, where it collided with two other cars, police said.

The high rate of death was a reminder of something most Long Island drivers already knew: The Southern State is a challenging road that now accommodates much more traffic than it was ever designed to carry.

A state Department of Transportation analysis of accidents in 2004 and 2005 found 29 crash-prone segments covering 14.7 miles on the aged parkway, including five of the 10 most dangerous spots on Long Island. The modern Long Island Expressway, by comparison, had just 12 high-accident spots totaling 4.4 miles of pavement, the analysis shows.

"If you drive on the Southern State the same way you drive on the [Long Island] Expressway, you're asking for trouble," said Frank Pearson, the lead engineer on Long Island for the state Department of Transportation.

The five most dangerous segments on the Southern State were the sites of 1,310 accidents over two years. Of those, five resulted in fatalities and 543 involved injuries.

"Lovely but deadly" is how Richard Retting, senior traffic engineer for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, describes the Southern State.

"Efforts were made over the decades to upgrade some of the roadside safety features and medians, but nobody can claim that these roads were ever designed or intended for high-speed, high-volume travel," Retting said. "We pay a price for shoe-horning these high volumes into antique roadways."

Master builder Robert Moses broke ground on the parkway in the summer of 1926, according to "The Power Broker," Robert Caro's book about Moses' career. The first 14 miles, from the New York City line to Wantagh, were completed two years later.

It wasn't long before Moses' vision of a bucolic thoroughfare turned into a nightmare of ever-increasing traffic.

Spike in traffic

Traffic escalated from 20 million cars a year in 1940 to 30 million in 1950, according to Caro's book. In the '50s and '60s, the four-lane parkway was divided and widened, to as many as eight lanes in some locations.

In 1993, Newsday reported that the segment between the Wantagh Parkway and Wantagh Avenue carried about 189,800 cars a day, or 69.3 million annually. Today, according to the DOT, that same segment averages more than 226,000 cars a day, or 82.5 million cars a year.

A recent DOT report to the Federal Highway Administration on the worst 5 percent of crash-prone sites on Long Island state routes included three short segments of the Southern State -- one at the intersection with Peninsula Boulevard, in South Hempstead, one just east of Hempstead Avenue, in West Hempstead, and one at the Wantagh Parkway, in North Wantagh.

The DOT reported that it would spend a total of $2.5 million to repave and restripe those locations. The department also noted that it had considered reconstructing each of the troubled segments, but "due to environmental concerns, cost and proximity of residential properties, it was deemed to be unfeasible."

DOT spokeswoman Eileen Peters said the DOT has made "many, many" improvements to the parkway over the decades, altering intersections where there was room, improving the banking on curves and, most recently, installing overhead electronic signs that give drivers real-time warnings about conditions ahead of them. But she said bringing the road up to modern interstate standards by straightening curves and flattening hills isn't being considered.

"The social, economic and environmental impacts are probably more than Long Island could bear," Peters said.

Retting agreed, saying there is a balance that needs to be struck between potential upgrades to the road and the impact on the nearby residents whose neighborhoods would need to be bulldozed to accommodate them.

Don't wish blindly

"Massive roadway safety improvements require right-of-way acquisitions, wider lanes, shoulders, medians, straightening, and so-on," Retting said. "You know, it's been said before: Be careful what you ask for because you might get it."

The rash of crashes early this year prompted the State Police to move up the start of its annual effort to crack down on speeding and aggressive driving on the road. In March, overhead signs and temporary ones on the side of the road warned drivers they were in a State Police enforcement zone.

"The driving behavior is what's causing these accidents," State Police Sgt. Michael Petronzio said at the time. "People have to drive at a safe and wise rate of speed, depending on the conditions of the roadway. If you know the road is going to have a curve in it, or it's going to be a little bit of a hill crest, or you know the ground is a little slick, you should know you have to drive at a lower rate of speed."

The handful of experts interviewed by Newsday agreed that there is no engineering fix for the Southern State and driver behavior is the most important problem to be solved.

"I have to think that, with the behavioral stuff on the highways, a lot of it is that in our society today there's very little sanction for doing insane things with a car," said Jonathan Orcutt, who was executive director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign when the interview was conducted but has since taken a position with the New York City DOT.

"People don't want traffic-law enforcement to be really efficient," he added. "But I think if you put it in terms of safety and talk about how many people are actually getting killed and hurt, you can make a pretty strong case that we need to do a lot more."