The Northway is so much a part of our DNA that it has turned the world around us into a numbers game. Trip planning is now all about the exits we use.
And while 126,000 vehicles a day play the numbers on the Northway, twice a day local commuters roll the dice and curse their luck on a stretch of the highway between exits seven and eight---in spite of the herculean effort that planting those Twin Bridges arches 14 and a half feet over the Mohawk entailed.
Not surprisingly, a feat of engineering that big demanded—and got--a spectacular sendoff. Since cutting a 176-mile-long ribbon was out of the question,
We rewind to the last day of August 1966 when Governor Nelson Rockefeller needed a big pair of scissors to open a 17-mile stretch from Warrensburg to Pottersville by helicopter!
The Northway linked upstate New York in a way that guaranteed brighter futures for small northern communities that had felt cut off from the bustling metro areas.
But, with long stretches of scenery and little else, it also created the need for emergency callboxes.
New York State Police Director of Public Information Beau Duffy explains, "The original intent was to make sure people had a way to contact authorities if they had an emergency."
A 710-phone system was installed by the New York Telephone Company from 1965 to 1967 at a cost of $683,000. It was one of the first emergency systems for motorists in the country.
The boxes were set up every half mile, leaving stranded motorists no more than a quarter mile away from a call for help. But modern-day cellphones were a game changer, making the callboxes all but obsolete.
Four years before the first bulky cellphone ever made a call, the Northway Emergency Phone System was already being dismantled. In 1981, DOT began a campaign to remove all 710 of the phones but met with so much resistance that only phones at the north and south ends of the road were decommissioned.
I asked Duffy why the system was dismantled? "My guess is it was old and unserviceable."
State police eventually replaced it with a radio-based system--for years, a welcome sight on a deserted road to a traveler in trouble now no longer needed in this age of Bluetooth and Siri and digital 9-1-1.
The callboxes were upgraded again in 2006 and the 47 remaining start appearing at the border with Canada and then disappear at exit 30. Over the past four years they have handled an average of just 27 calls a year. Last year was a big year with 30 calls but the maintenance cost for the boxes themselves was 141 thousand dollars! Duffy says that meant each call was coming in at a cost of 1500 dollars! And, as a result, the remaining dinosaurs are about to became extinct.
"Yeah," he says, "we can't find replacement parts... We really can't maintain it anymore. We've already started taking out boxes, but it's not a fast process. It's probably going to take until the fall to have them all removed." He expects all the callboxes to be gone by October or November.
The first quarter of this year only seven SOSes had come in, sounding the death knell to a once-vital system that in its day helped motorists with breakdowns, accidents, roadside hazards, information, car fires, and wrong-way vehicles.