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Bear Mountain Collision Sparks Safety Concerns

CORTLANDT MANOR, N.Y. – A head-on collision on the Bear Mountain State Parkway renewed criticism about whether the state highway should have dividers. The winding, high-speed road has been the site of several serious accidents, and the subject of multiple resolutions by the Cortlandt Town Board.

“I will tell you when we hear the Bear Mountain Parkway, the first thing that jumps into my head is that it’s going to be a serious accident, very rarely is it a fender bender like we have on Route 6,” said Chief of the Lake Mohegan Fire Department, Brian Wolert. The parkway is in the department’s service area, straddling the Yorktown-Cortlandt border.

Since 2005, the Town of Cortlandt has sent multiple letters to the New York State Department of Transportation, and passed multiple resolutions requesting a lane divider or median be placed on Bear Mountain State Parkway.  

Mike Cotton, Regional Traffic Engineer for the New York State Department of Transportation said determining where medians and lane dividers should be put in depends not only on the number of accidents a particular road has, but the type of accidents.

“A lot of factors have to go in to where you put them, if you put them into a place with a lot of intersections, you have a lot of ends, and then you have another safety issues with people hitting the ends of them,” he said. “If you decide to put concrete barriers, that does not deflect at all, but what usually happens is you decrease the number of crossover, you increase the number of accidents on the same side of the road,” he said in regards to traffic entering the oncoming lane.

Any fatality on a road prompts an investigation by the NYSDOT, “We always have studies to change geometrics along roads,” said Cotton. He was not able to immediately comment on whether the Bear Mountain Parkway had been the subject of past investigations, but that communities’ concerns voiced through letters and emails are taken seriously.

“They’re our eyes and ears, we don’t have time to be on every road, we get calls and letters all the time,” he said. “Nobody knows more about a given community than the community themselves.”

The concern spread through The Daily Croton and The Daily Cortlandt’s Facebook pages, some residents saying the dividers were necessary years ago, while others argued that human error couldn’t be solved by separating the lanes.

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