Audible traffic signals to help disabled

Marilyn Tucci and her guide dog, Anna, were walking to a meeting in Smithtown when they stopped at an intersection on Main Street.

The Shirley woman, blind since birth, could not see traffic signals that would tell her when it was OK to cross the street. When she thought the coast was clear, she motioned to Anna to move forward. But the Labrador-golden retriever mix would not budge. So Tucci and her canine companion waited, listening as cars whizzed by.

"I stood on this corner, no exaggeration, for 20 minutes," Tucci said of the day in December 2010. "Every time I thought it would be safe to cross . . . the dog would refuse."

Crossing Main Street became less difficult this year with the addition of devices known as audible pedestrian signals. The machines, also called audible crosswalks, are used at an increasing number of Long Island intersections.

New models, such as the ones installed in Smithtown, have an electronically generated voice that tells pedestrians when it is safe to cross a road and counts down the seconds before a traffic signal changes. Earlier versions, many still in use, beep but do not talk.

Guide dogs are taught to not cross a street if they sense it isn't safe. But dogs aren't perfect, and the audible signals are "just one more thing to make it a little more safer," said Anne Mercer of the Guide Dog Foundation in Smithtown.

The state Department of Transportation has installed the devices, which cost about $1,500 each, at 32 intersections in Nassau and Suffolk since 2004, said Eileen Peters, a DOT spokeswoman. Suffolk has put them on seven county roads, and Nassau has nine audible signals on county roads, county spokeswomen said.

An audible signal is to be installed by fall at Montauk Highway and William Floyd Parkway in Shirley, near Tucci's home. "It's going to mean that maybe I can cross the street safely," said Tucci, 60, an independent-living specialist for the Suffolk Independent Living Organization in Ronkonkoma, which works with the disabled.

The Shirley signal was requested on Tucci's behalf by Patrick Mitchell, commander of American Veterans Sons Post 48 in Blue Point. The retired special education teacher said he has successfully lobbied state and Suffolk officials to place more than a dozen of the devices on local roads.

"Who knows?" Mitchell said. "Maybe they'll be helping me someday."

In addition to the blind, audible crosswalks help seniors and others whose infirmities make crossing the street challenging. Suffolk County Legis. Lynne Nowick (R-St. James) said they help nonhandicapped pedestrians, too. "This device," she said, "is like having your mother standing next to you, telling you how many seconds you have left."

By the numbers

Intersections with audible signals

Intersections in Nassau

Intersections in Suffolk

Cost per signal

Where they are

Audible pedestrian signals are at the following locations: