Returning eastward from Belleayre ski mountain near the northeastern limit of Ulster County, a driver on New York State Highway 28 passes through portions of Pine Hill, Big Indian, Shandaken, Phoenicia, Mount Tremper, Boiceville, Shokan, West Hurley, Woodstock, the Town of Kingston and the Town of Ulster until the highway ends at the traffic rotary near the Kingston city line.
For those 36 miles of exchanging the Catskill Mountains for the wider skies and lower altitude of the Hudson Valley, grooves have been pressed into the asphalt under the center lines to jog the attention of any driver drifting over into oncoming traffic.
“They were first added about eight years ago by the Department of Transportation [DOT], and the DOT tries to put them on all state highways,” says Brian Slack, principal transportation planner for the Ulster County Transportation Council (UCTC).
He calls these machine-pressed grooves rumblestrips. “That’s been a major step forward that’s probably contributed to preventing a definite number of crashes on our highways,” Slack says
Without the nagging reminder of the rumblestrips, only yellow paint on the asphalt and a presumption of shared mutual interest in going on living separate the vehicles going in opposite directions on this road.
Except for the stretches where the speed limit drops as the road passes through the hamlets of Boiceville and Shokan, or expands to more lanes in anticipation of the very occasional traffic light, the shoulders of the highway west of Zena Road are as wide as the traffic lanes themselves are ample. Bicyclists can comfortably ride two abreast as traffic zips past heading east and west.
Navigating through the ambient traffic surrounding the county’s only city is a dicier business. The shoulders for a bicyclist or pedestrian coming from the traffic circle passing the on-ramps and off-ramps for routes 87 and 209 are single-file.
The drivers coming off the Thruway are used to being passed driving 70 or 80 miles an hour. They notice almost all the other drivers on Route 28 going 52 to 55 miles per hour, faster than the posted speed limit. Increasing their own pace to 60, they get nailed for speeding by state troopers from the Hurley barracks who wait for the unwary like funnel spiders.
Just past the intersection near Motel 19, a pedestrian was killed crossing Route 28 in December 2021. No charges filed against the driver.
A grassy median separates the four lanes of traffic, two easterly and two westerly, from one another. Where the road twists like a ribbon in two different half-mile sections, a narrow metal barrier preventing head-on collisions replaces the grass median.
Formerly regional director of the Hudson Valley DOT and now the alder for the City of Kingston’s Ward 6, Bob Dennison recalls the barrier’s installation.
“Years ago, there was not a median barrier here, and there were a number of crossover crashes,” says Dennison. “The business people were reluctant because it limits the access to their businesses, but we went ahead and did it because it’s the right thing to do.”
Past the barriers, once the straightaway starts, the road becomes a free-for-all. Drivers – particularly the customers of the competing Speedway gas station heading east and the former Stony Hollow Sunoco station heading west – signal a turn as they slow to a complete stop in the fast lane, waiting to cross the oncoming traffic safely heedless of the traffic behind. Their loyalty to a cheaper price is a powerful incentive.
It all happens in a couple of seconds. The drivers behind them either slow to a stop or after a quick glance at their mirrors swerve to the other lane – into the blind spot.
Among transportation experts roads can be identified based on functional characteristics and then placed within changeable hierarchies.
If facilitating the flow of large amounts of traffic is the yardstick against which to measure, then high-speed interstate highways occupy the place of eminence, followed by major and minor arterial roads, major and minor collector roads, and the local roads that are in last place in terms of importance.
If access to homes and businesses is most important, then the hierarchy is reversed. City streets offer access to every side street, parking lot, driveway and alley.
Route 28, which serves both as a city street and an interstate highway, is referred to as a major artery. “Another major arterial would be like Broadway,” explains Dennison, “whereas a collector road is a road that other local roads tie into, and they deliver the traffic to a minor arterial, which would deliver to a major arterial.”
For the businessperson who set up shop along this major arterial road, this cardiological language carries special significance. The vehicles driving along the artery may be thought of as corpuscles carrying the oxygen necessary for an organ of business to grow and prosper.
An estimated 5.4 million drivers every year use the 5.5-mile segment of Route 28 between the Route 209 intersection and where it begins to pass the Ashokan Reservoir.
For a long time now, modern society has preferred to shop among numbered aisles rather than forage in the forest. While pleasure-seekers and road-trippers are a welcome sideline and a boon, it’s the big rigs and tractor trailers which bring in the staples of existence for distribution and consumption that the roads are principally maintained.
Pedestrians and bicyclists who wish to share the roads amidst the constant flow of fast-moving traffic set out at a disadvantage. As the ratio of sidewalks and bike lanes to the sheer number of asphalt roads attest, society has demonstrated that which it believes more worthy of investment.
To keep things humming along smoothly, the tension is between the competing desires of maximum flow, unimpeded, versus maximum access, unobstructed.
For all concerned, safety is paramount, but the mounting body count is beginning to attract attention.
Nationally, near 40,000 people die from traffic accidents every year (42,915 deaths in 2021. 38,824 in 2020). Ulster County’s annual portion averages out to just 14 fatalities and 200 serious injuries out of 6000 crashes.
The numbers were shared in a 2021 report put out by the UCTC with the partnership of consultants Cambridge Systematics. Called the Ulster County Road Safety Plan, the report set out to examine crash data in the county over the eight years from 2010 to 2018.
“Kingston is always going to have the most amount of crashes,” says Slack, “because that’s where people travel the most. What we needed to do was to normalize those crash rates based on the amount of vehicle miles traveled. Then we could really look at the whole county where there are crash rates above what we would expect to see on average.”
The report also broke down the information by crash type as well: roadway departures, right angle, T-bones.
“If a car leaves the road and then comes into contact with a fixed object and or rolls,” says Slack, “that is your roadway-departure crash.”
A Town of Ulster police officer, 27-year-old Travis Nissen, died in 2011, traveling west on Route 28 near Dubois Road in Shokan. He lost control of his Buick, crossed the road, and crashed into a utility pole.
Five years later 16-year-old Damien Kovacs lost control of his vehicle while traveling west on Route 28 in Shokan. He too veered from the road near Dubois Road. He too hit a utility pole.
According to the road safety plan study, roadway departures account for almost 40 percent of Ulster County traffic fatalities and serious injuries where a crash type could be identified.
As the rate of speed at which a vehicle travels increases, so do the chances of death for pedestrians or bike riders struck. Brian C. Tefft, principal researcher for the foundation for traffic safety (AAA), released a study in 2011 which demonstrates the axiom with hard data. His study explains that the average risk of death for a pedestrian reaches ten percent at an impact speed of 23 m.p.h., 25 percent at 32 m.p.h., 50 percent at 42 m.p.h., 75 percent at 50 m.p.h., and 90 percent at 58 m.p.h. Advanced age increases the likelihood of a negative result.
Dennison cites a formula for kinetic energy which describes the additional energy carried by an object in motion, where M stands for mass, in kilograms, and V for velocity, as meters per second. “The whole speed thing,” says Dennison, “KE equals one half MV squared.”
“That has a huge impact on the on the damage that’s created by a crash,” he explains. “The kinetic energy is what kills people. On the interstate system, truck crashes are terrible because of the mass.”
Infamous in the memory of longtime locals is a June 2000 crash in which a state police vehicle making a u-turn across the traffic lanes on Route 28 near Pine Street in West Hurley was hit broadside by a tractor trailer and pushed off the road and down an embankment. Michael Kelly, 49, Kenneth A. Poormon, 23, two state troopers, perished inside the vehicle.
Through habit it’s common to refer to car crashes as accidents, traffic safety advocates have replaced the term with the more assertive ‘traffic violence’ in discussing the consequences of automobile versus pedestrian or bicyclist interactions.
This was news to Slack.
“We use the term crash,” Slack said. “For many years, when you read reports in the media about a fatality on the highway it’s often referred to as an ‘accident.’ That term implies no fault. You know, ‘Oops, it was an accident.’ Among the engineers and planners and the owners of the highway who are responsible for its maintenance, the people who drive on it, and the people who walk on it, everyone has a shared responsibility here to keep our roads safer.”
As the numbers show, a kind of numbness over traffic-related deaths has set in over decades. The feeling often shared is that they are tragic but unavoidable.
“Historically, we didn’t pay as much attention to the crashes on the highway system as we should,” says Dennison. “We have been willing to accept some crashes for, you know, efficiency’s sake, which is kind of strange, and I think we’re moving away from that.”
While not as frequent as rear-end collisions, head-on collisions are the most fatal type of car crash in Ulster County after roadway departures.
In April 2022, 40-year-old Tramayne Holmes crossed over into the westbound lane and struck a 2022 Peterbilt tractor-trailer near the Tibetan center on Route 28.
In the summer of 2023, Anna Maguire struck a Dodge Ram pickup truck with her Subaru Outback head-on at Route 28 and Bridge Street just outside Phoenicia. State troopers said Maguire failed to negotiate a curve.
“There’s a move afoot about a thing called Vision Zero,” says Dennison. “They’ve done it in many other places in the country and internationally. It really is a movement to create a situation in the transportation system where there are no deaths.”
Hoboken, New Jersey, of all places, just celebrated three years without a single traffic death.
“I think you’ve got to worry about everybody that’s using the transportation system,” says Dennison. “Pedestrians and bicyclists are vulnerable. People in cars are vulnerable. People in mass transit are somewhat vulnerable. It’s dangerous out there.”
This January a driver on Route 28 in Mount Tremper lost control of his Volvo tractor-trailer after rear-ending a vehicle. He veered across the centerline into oncoming traffic, hitting another car head-on, killing Kingston High School juniors Jack Noble and Dillon Gokey.
The state DOT has announced its intention to conduct an investigation of the facility — the word transportation experts use to describe everything from a stretch of road to a culvert. The facility of the Mount Tremper crash was the intersection of routes 28 and 212, where substantial new construction had been completed last year.
“The department has a process whereby they can bring in a crash investigation team,” says Dennison. “When I was the chief engineer, we did it on Long Island, for example. I think that’s what they’re going to do. Bring in traffic experts from the Department of Transportation. Probably bring in crash experts from the Federal Highway Administration. Bring in some police and fire people. And they’ll go to the site, and they’ll do an in-depth analysis of the crash.”
County executive Jen Metzger opened her remarks at her state-of-the-county address last week in Saugerties by announcing new initiatives to create safer roads in Ulster County, a three-pronged effort consisting of enforcement, education and engineering.
Sheriff Juan Figueroa, whose office has a substation in Shandaken, plans to increase his patrols on roads with the highest accident rates. The state police, who issue the vast majority of traffic tickets on Route 28, have long maintained a modest satellite office in Shokan.
An education campaign aimed at the public will discourage aggressive and distracted driving. It will emphasize the vulnerability of pedestrians and bicyclists, and it will reinforce the view that it is everyone’s shared responsibility to reduce accidents.
Calls have been made for the state DOT to address safety standards on state roads.
“All of these actions on enforcement, education and engineering will help to improve safety,” said Metzger. “But ultimately every one of us has to act as responsible citizens on our roads. That’s the single most important thing that we can do.”
It is everyone’s shared responsibility in keeping vulnerable people safe.
For now, Ulster County stands at another haunted inflection point while awaiting the completion .of yet another study. Transportation safety advocacy groups like Safe Pass Ulster are calling for immediate action. They want to implement solutions that transportation professionals have been in agreement on for 20 years.
By limiting traffic speeds to levels unlikely to result in severe injury or death in places where pedestrians and vehicles may encounter one another, lives will be saved. Creating physical separations for both pedestrians and vehicles will save lives. Increasing shoulder widths will save lives. Vehicle‐based systems that detect pedestrians and warn the driver or brake automatically when a collision is imminent will save lives.
The National Department of Transportation has announced the first inevitable steps towards equipping all cars with breathalyzers. This will save lives.
Some remedial measures to eliminate maddening relics of a bygone era in the Route 28 corridor are so simple it’s a wonder they haven’t been implemented. Drivers on the minor roads in Hurley and Olive built contiguous to the Ashokan Reservoir didn’t have t-intersections with Route 28 to benefit from. There was nowhere to cross to.
Even now, the stop signs and lines on these minor roads are on irregular angles to the major highway, causing problems of visibility for drivers wishing to enter Route 28. For just a few dollars, these intersections could be made perpendicular to the main highway. Though doing so would decrease accidents and save lives, for decade after decade it hasn’t been done.
The National Department of Transportation has announced the first inevitable steps towards equipping all cars with breathalyzers. This will save lives.
Four people have already died in traffic-related deaths this year in Ulster County. Experts predict at least ten more deaths will be coming by the end of December unless something changes.
“Clearly the person behind the wheel of the two-ton steel-and-glass machine is going to win whenever it comes up against the bicyclist or pedestrian,” says Slack.
At the time of this writing, two incidents which indisputably qualify as traffic violence remain unsolved. Twenty-one-year-old Starllie Swonyoung was struck and killed while walking south along Route 9W in Malden. Raymond Rattray was struck and killed walking south along Route 208 in New Paltz. Both drivers kept going.
Additional data by Geddy Sveikauskas
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