West New York surely has the highest incidence of running red lights of any city, town, village or hamlet in New Jersey. Just ride through town. When a traffic light turns green, hold your breath and count to 10 before proceeding. Take a green light at face value in this city, and you may not live to regret your naivete.
Red-light jumping is a daily occurrence in West New York. Just a few of the more dangerous intersections are Boulevard East at 51st and 54th St., and 54th and Park, Broadway, Hudson and Palisades Ave. Any intersection in WNY is a potential crash site due to the sovereign contempt that West New Yorkers have for their own traffic lights. Running red lights has become the town sport: Invade the intersection after 1,2, 3, 4 or 5 seconds of red and see if you can get away with it. In this town, unfortunately, you can -- it happens here hundreds of times every day, and absolutely nothing is done about it.
I brought this public menace to the attention of the West New York Police last year, as well as the other threat posed by out-of-town speed-maniacs (often sporting NJ license plates) who tear recklessly through Boulevard East, beeping their horns at all and sundry who get in their way.
Most officials repled that they were aware of the red-light problem but that the police has limited resources and cannot be everywhere all the time to catch every malefactor. Fair enough a statement, as far as it goes.
But if police resources are limited, common sense dictates that they be allocated on a priority basis, and that serious problems, rather than trivia, be given priority. Ignoring red lights and speeding through residential streets like Blvd. East, being moving violations which threaten public safety, deserve priority over where and how the town's own residents park their cars overnight.
What, then, has been the response of the WNY Traffic Police? The easy one, of course; ignore real threats to public safety and go instead for the fast parking ticket and easy money for the Violations Bureau. This means leaving dangerous intersections unsurveilled and Boulevard East without radar, at the same time that Boulevard East residents are periodically targeted for parking in their own driveways. Now since driveways on Blvd. East are short, vehicles usually stick out a few feet onto the public sidewalk -- big deal. This fine legal technicality was ignored for decades until about 1998. The town suddenly got religion, applying a law whose enforcement served only to worsen the parking nightmare in West New York by forcing more vehicles out onto the streets, competing for an already deficient number of parking spaces. Even homeowners who nose their cars up against the front of their buildings to leave several few feet of sidewalk clear for pedestrians to walk by are not immune from these gratuitous and insulting summonses from over-aggressive policemen who prefer harassing the town's own residents to catching out-of-town speeders and intersection hotspurs.
Leaving your car in your driveway for just five minutes to bring in the groceries or laundry risks a $43 ticket. The traffic police never bother to knock on you door first to ask you to move your car -- an elementary courtesy which would make for far better police-community relations in a town that could certainly benefit from this. The police say that they have an obligation to respond to complaints about vehicles encroaching on the sidewalk. Why can't that response be a knock on the door? Why must it assume the form of a knee-jerk summons and a $43 fine? And lastly, why have traffic officers not responded with similar zeal to complaints about speeding in our neighborhood and out-of-control intersections? Is it because parking tickets represent easy money for the Violations Bureau and fast, effortless police work? If so, does such an ordering of priorities enhance public safety or, for that matter, the police's image in the community?
Instead of victimizing the town's own residents, the traffic police should be conducting surveillance at intersections to catch and ticket traffic-light violators, even if this means a low economic rate of return in terms of minutes spent on stake-outs per fine earned. Although the Sidewalk No-Park rule is state law, it should not be an enforcement priority (and was not for decades) in a town whose intersections have all the order of a game of Russian Roulette and whose principle north-south thoroughfare at times become Boulevard Speedway.
In the last five years there have been four or five major accidents along Boulevard East just along the block between 51st St., and 54th Street, where residents who have parked their cars on the street, as the police insist, have suffered over $30,000 in combined damages from speeders and drunks who have crashed into their cars. Just last year someone lost control of his SUV and smashed up the cars of three neighbors. Speeders and drunk drivers get away with this recklessness, barring accidents such as those just described because there are no speed-traps or radar points along Boulevard East.
The only rason why the intersections of WNY and Boulevard East have not yet become a slaughterhouse is that everyone in town is aware of the problem and so compensates by driving defensively. As long as police resources continue to be concentrated on trivia, individual self-preservation will be the only form of defense. Outsiders who race through Bouelvard East on their way in and out of New York City will continue to speed and execute reckless passing maneuvers, cursing at residents who dare to slow down to turn off into their driveways. And why should these speed-freaks worry? Our traffic police are otherwise engaged, issuing parking tickets to homeowners and taxpayers.
Unfortunately, some day a stranger in town or a new resident unaware of the deeply ingrained WNY disdain of red lights and of the town's peculiar allocation of police resources may take a green light at face value and proceed through an intersection on Go. And then a driver or two, or perhaps an entire family, may become crash victims. Sadly maybe this is what it will take to divert the attention of the West New York Traffic Police from trivia to real police work.
Yours disgustedly,
John F. Doublier
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