BUFFALO, N.Y. — For the second time this summer, a terrifying scene in Buffalo came at the hands of a preventable act.
At 12:45 a.m. Sunday morning, three people were hospitalized after a car traveling the wrong way on Route 5 collided head-on with another, according to a Buffalo Police spokesperson.
It happened near the Ohio Street exit after a 39-year-old male with his 4-year-old son in the car began traveling the wrong way and struck another vehicle, flipping it onto its roof. The 48-year-old woman whose car he hit was also taken to ECMC for non-life-threatening injuries.
The road was shut down going eastbound for several hours.
Route 5 reopened to traffic at 4:30 a.m., according to NITTEC.
No charges have been filed, and there’s no word as of Sunday night on if the driver was under the influence. The accident is currently under investigation.
The crash comes just over a month after a similar one took place on the 33. A driver under the influence once again struck another head on while traveling the wrong way, sending a 25-year-old man to the hospital with serious injuries.
The two incidents are just a snapshot of a nationwide problem that claims about 400 lives a year.
Here in New York, red wrong-way signs are all that exist as far as preventive measures go.
But just southeast in Connecticut, they’re taking a different approach.
“This occurs a lot more often than we actually know,” said Eric Jackson with the Connecticut Transportation Institute. “What they're doing is they're actually monitoring for vehicles that are traveling the wrong direction.”
Jackson said they’ve recently installed more advanced preventive measures, like blinking lights on wrong-way signs and even cameras that will record when a driver is heading the wrong way and immediately alert police. So far, they believe they’re working.
“It really starts giving us an idea of where people are getting on the wrong way,” Jackson said. “They've already captured a number of events where drivers have realized they're going the wrong way and then self-corrected or turned around on the interstate.”
New York state officials tell 2 On Your Side they aren’t considering any technology quite at that level yet and feel that this is mainly a problem due to those driving under the influence. However, they are using more pavement markers and trying to enhance some warning signs to prevent wrong-way crashes.