The MetroCard van will make its rounds starting Oct. 19 for anyone who wants to buy the cards used on Westchester and New York City buses and the city subways. Here’s the county press release, complete with dates, times and locations for the van:

The full-service MetroCard van will make Read more of this entry »

E-ZPass repair work at the Spring Valley toll barrier located on northbound Thruway in?Spring?Valley will close lanes beginning at 10 p.m., Monday, until 6 a.m., Tuesday, weather permitting.

At 10 p.m. on Monday, a northbound double lane closure will be in place.

At 11 p.m., all three northbound lanes will be closed.

During the E-ZPass repairs, all traffic will be diverted through the toll lanes. Cars will not be required to pay tolls.

The rain date is Tuesday night into Wednesday morning. Electronic message signs will notify drivers of the closure.

The first-ever Metro-North trains from New Haven through Westchester and to the Meadowlands football games went off without a hitch, although not that many sports fans were on board.

In all, 328 passengers rode the double-decker NJ Transit trains brought onto Metro-North tracks by Metro-North crews.

“It was not a full train, but it’s Read more of this entry »

 

The Rockland JCC tonight will host a a free information meeting about a law that imposes a new payroll tax, among other fees, to help fund the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

“What Will the New MTA Taxes Cost You?”  takes place at 7:15 p.m. at the JCC, 450 West Nyack Road, West Nyack.

State Senator Thomas Morahan, Assemblywoman Ellen Jaffee, and Assemblyman Kenneth Zebrowski , Jr., are expected to explain the law and its implications, as well as their opposition to the legislation.

In May, the state Legislature approved the payroll, or mobility, tax to raise nearly $2.3 billion for the MTA in its 12 member counties, which avoided steep fare and toll hikes for MTA services. It compels employers to pay 34 cents for every $100 of payroll. Drivers in the MTA?region also will pay a special surcharge of $50 for a two-year vehicle registration and a $16 driver license surcharge.

The meeting is coordinated by WBL, which describes itself as an informally organized group of local businesspeople who have been meeting since 1991 to discuss topics of interest to them and their businesses.

Some Westchester County legislators were not happy to hear yesterday that the coming state law banning texting while driving is actually weaker than the county’s law — and that the county’s law will be replaced by it.

But that wasn’t the oddest response I got to the articles I wrote about texting and the many other things people do behind the wheel that make other drivers uncomfortable. One somewhat brazen reader related this tale:

“I got pulled over once for using a cell phone and when I went to court I bought Read more of this entry »

The husband of Diane Schuler, whose wrong-way drive on the Taconic ended with eight people dead, appeared on Larry King Live with his lawyer and sister-in-law last night.

There’s nothing I can say about it, except watch it for yourself here.

Read The Journal News story about it here.

Expect to see more about it Read more of this entry »

This morning on the way to work, I saw a guy putting on his shirt in his convertible. He was stopped on Griffen Avenue at Weaver Street on the New Rochelle-Scarsdale border.

OK, that wasn’t really bad. The guy was stopped, no one was behind him.

But I’ve been talking with people a lot about things we do while driving that are not really condusive to steering and keeping an eye on the road. Eating, shaving, Read more of this entry »

I’ve already talked about how strange and deadly this summer has been on our roads. Well, the oddness continues.

On Aug. 22, we had the Scarsdale guy who chased a man 15 miles from Putnam to Danbury, Conn., after the guy in a pick-up truck allegedly struck his car on I-684. Danbury cops charged the driver of the truck with driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

In Rockland, there’s another sad case: A man who is charged with vehicular manslaughter, in addition to driving while intoxicated, because his friend, a passenger in his car, died when he crashed a Ford Mustang on the New York State Thruway.

This follows the summer where a mom was arrested on a DWI charge after her daughter dialed 911 because they’d been in an accident, and where two people were hit with DWI charges for driving the same car. (They switched places before cops got to them, then admitted it.)

And of course, there was the horrific July 26 crash of Long Island mom Diane Schuler on the Taconic, killing Schuler, her daughter and three nieces and three men in an SUV she struck head-on. A toxicology report shows her blood alcohol level was more than twice the legal limit and she had THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, in her system.

Will the strangeness end? Or at least ease up a bit?

Time will tell.