Dangerous roads newsletter: Perilous treks across Long Island's hazardous intersections

In February 1921, a Los Angeles Evening Express article declared Lynbrook Village Police Officer Frank Short the "busiest traffic cop in New York." According to the article, "Shorty" directed cars and pedestrians through the village’s notoriously busy "Five Corners" intersection, where "tourists roll by from all parts of the country." And it’s only gotten more hectic since then.

Living just a mile from the Five Corners, I’ve carefully driven through the intersection for years, but had little reason to ever dare cross it on foot, much less with my kids in tow. And then in 2018 Regal went and opened a heck-of-a-nice multiplex theater right at one of those corners, at Merrick Road and Hempstead Avenue — across the street from the municipal parking lot.

As avid moviegoers, my family and I now find ourselves making the perilous trek through the intersection a few times a month, along with loads of families with children a lot smaller than mine. If you think the latest "Mission Impossible" flick has danger and suspense, you should just try watching moviegoers rush across the Five Corners intersection to be in their seats by showtime.

And, yet, as scary as the scariest intersection near my home is, it doesn’t rank among the five most dangerous on Long Island. I should know — I recently had to cross four of them while putting together video content for Newsday.

At both Route 347 and Nicolls Road in Lake Grove, and at Straight Path and West Sunrise Highway in Lindenhurst, a Newsday photojournalist and I I traversed chaotic intersections without the support of an actual crosswalk. Broadway and Old Country Road in Hicksville did have a crosswalk, but I still had to rush to clear seven lanes of traffic before the countdown timer ticked down to zero. While shooting social media video at North Franklin Street and Jackson Street, a car sped so fast behind me, I stopped and asked my iPhone camera, "Whoa! Did you see that?"

As Newsday’s team of towns reporters uncovered, those four intersections, along with Veterans Memorial Highway and Old Nichols Road in Islandia, combined for a staggering 2,139 crashes over a decade — 72 of them involving serious injuries or deaths. Those numbers were front of mind as I crossed the intersections, lest I become another statistic.

On a recent Thursday morning, traffic safety guru Elyssa Kyle and I stood at the northeast corner of Broadway and Old Country Road in Hicksville and watched cars, trucks, pedestrians and cyclists all trying to coexist in the asphalt trapezoid at the center of the intersection. The reason Long Island’s intersections are particularly problematic was evident: everyone is in everyone else’s way.

"You’ve got people making left turns, right turns, going through the intersection. There’s just many more points where two vehicles, or a vehicle and a person, could crash into each other," said Kyle, placemaking director for Huntington-based Vision Long Island, who noted that the danger is especially pronounced for cyclists and pedestrians. "They don’t have crumple zones. They don’t have air bags. They don’t have all those layers of protection that drivers have."

You can't fully eliminate the dangers of an intersection, but Kyle said engineering can make them safer. Curb extensions can shorten the length pedestrians have to walk across, and some crosswalk countdown timers give pedestrians a few-seconds head start before giving the green light to cars.

Those are just a few of the strategies developed to make intersections safer since the days of "Shorty the traffic cop," who, according to that 1921 article, "never gets ‘rattled,’ even in the thickest jam."

I cannot say the same for myself.

By Alfonso A. Castillo

alfonso.castillo@newsday.com@alfonsoreports

Alfonso Castillo has been reporting for Newsday since 1999 and covering the transportation beat since 2008. He grew up in the Bronx and Queens and now lives in Valley Stream with his wife and two sons.