Hurley wants to address unsafe streets and to lobby the state to reduce the speed limit on a stretch of U.S. Route 209 in the town. The town’s safety committee made a presentation at the town board’s July 9 meeting.
The committee’s broad goals range from more complete EMS service to improvement of road safety. Lower speed limits are being sought.
Committee member Harry McNamara said he had joined the safety committee because the roads in Hurley, particularly Old Hurley, were “a serious danger at this time.” He singled out Main Street, Schoolhouse Lane, Zandhoek Road, Millbrook Avenue and Route 209.
The committee is petitioning the town for new safety measures. “Speed humps were installed on Joy’s Lane,” he said, “and we welcome the progress reports and the results there, as they can be effective in other areas.”
McNamara said town supervisor Mike Boms and other board members had been helpful. But the town needed help at the county and state levels.
“We’re going to use as precedent Stone Ridge, basically from High Falls Cafe all through town,” Boms said. “The problem we have is that the county engineer, who lives in Hurley, right up on 209, is not agreeing with us on this. We have to convince him that this is important enough. We are a pass-through, as he says.”
The time is right
McNamara thought the timing for Hurley’s requests was right.
“This is a fantastic time to take on these issues,” he said. “The City of Albany has just unanimously approved a citywide 25-mile-an-hour speed limit that was proposed in 2022. Mayor Steve Noble of Kingston has just put forth a resolution to lower the speed limit in the city to 25 miles an hour as well. So people across the region are clamoring for safe streets.”
The easiest and cheapest way to make streets safer was to lower speed limits, he said. He read a letter from Ulster County Historical Society president Marian McCorkle-Beckerman, who expressed concern for visitors to its museum on U.S. Route 209 in Hurley.
“Many of our visitors comment on how frightened they are when entering and exiting our driveway on a 55-mile-an-hour road,” she wrote. “Many will visit our museum because of it.”
The speed limit drops to 30 m.p.h. on Route 209 through the Main Street historic district in Stone Ridge, which increases safety, McCorkle-Beckerman noted.
Hurley’s historic district would benefit from lowering the speed limit to 30 m.p.h. for the same reason, McNamara said. Schoolhouse Lane and portions of Main Street are an emergency egress for the Ernest C. Myer Elementary School, but the roads are treated as on- and off-ramps for Route 209 and are not safe for schoolchildren.
The town board passed a resolution in 2021 to make Schoolhouse Lane a school zone, but Boms was recently told the request had to come from the Myer School principal.
Russell Road was also dangerous, he explained. “Cars fly off 209 onto Russell Road and immediately over a pedestrian crosswalk on the rail-trail,” he said. “The entrances of the O&W rail-trail are clogged with cautious drivers waiting for an opportunity to safely exit. This is arguably the area with the highest pedestrian traffic in all of Hurley because of the rail-trail.”
He said nearly all the towns on the Route 209 corridor had lower speed limits than does Hurley.
Reducing speed limits
The committee recommended signs for school-bus stops on Zandhoek Road, Millbrook Avenue and Hurley Avenue, designation of Schoolhouse Lane as a school zone and installation of speed humps on it, and the lowering of speed limits on county roads in Hurley to 30 m.p.h.
Additionally, the committee recommended lowering the speed limit on Route 209 to 40 m.p.h. Lowering the speed limits would increase travel time an additional three seconds on Main Street and 52 seconds on the Hurley portion of Route 209, McNamara calculated.
“That’s less than a one minute of travel time to give Hurley and its history its due respect,” he argued, “to improve outdoor recreation for the residents of our town and people from other towns who come to visit and use the rail-trail — and that now extends to Kingston — and to improve safety so our children can walk to school or so our neighbors can pull out of their driveway.”
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