Fifteen Injured In Queens School Bus Crash, City Hall Blames Elmhurst Hospital For Not Having Bigger Parking Lot

FDNY Response Praised, Intersection Design Quietly Reviewed For Twelfth Time This Decade

QUEENS, NEW YORK —

Six adults and nine children were transported to Elmhurst Hospital with minor injuries Wednesday afternoon following a school bus crash near the Long Island Expressway and Grand Central Parkway — an intersection that traffic engineers describe, privately, as “a suggestion of an intersection” rather than an actual intersection.

The FDNY responded within minutes. The hospital has confirmed all patients are stable. The Department of Transportation has confirmed, for the twelfth time this decade, that it will review the design of the intersection.

The Intersection

The LIE-Grand Central Parkway interchange has been the site of numerous accidents, near misses, and philosophical questions about whether human beings should be operating motor vehicles at all. According to DOT records, the intersection has been “under review” consistently since approximately 2011, with reviews occurring approximately every eleven months and resulting in approximately zero structural changes.

“We hear the community’s concerns,” said a DOT spokesperson, using the exact phrase that has been used in every previous press conference about the intersection. “We are evaluating options.” The options, one engineer later admitted anonymously, “are the same options we evaluated last time. They remain expensive and difficult to implement.”

The Systemic Angle

Editors at Bohiney Magazine note that New York City has a remarkable ability to identify dangerous intersections, study them extensively, issue thorough reports about them, and then leave them exactly as they are. “This is the NYC model of public safety,” one columnist wrote. “It is extraordinarily thorough on paper.”

A correspondent at The London Prat compared the interchange to London’s Elephant and Castle roundabout, which was similarly notorious for decades before finally being redesigned in 2022. “We took forty years to fix ours,” she wrote. “New York may yet beat us in patience.”

According to Transportation Alternatives, dozens of New Yorkers — including children — are injured or killed each year at so-called “engineering failure” intersections, many of which have been repeatedly flagged and repeatedly ignored. The DOT’s position is that “budget constraints” make comprehensive reform “challenging.”

The children involved in Wednesday’s crash reportedly showed admirable composure. One nine-year-old, waiting for a parent outside the hospital, offered the most devastating review of NYC infrastructure ever issued: “I knew something bad was going to happen. Every time we take that turn, something bad happens. Mom always says it.” The same child then asked if she could have a popsicle.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani, asked about the crash, promised that “safety is my top priority” — a phrase that has now appeared in approximately 14,000 mayoral press releases since 2002, according to a database maintained by a Columbia University graduate student with too much free time.

At press time, DOT had announced a new round of community input meetings about the intersection. The meetings are expected to produce a report. The report is expected to produce nothing. For further coverage of institutional inertia, see McSweeneys.

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The post Fifteen Injured In Queens School Bus Crash, City Hall Blames Elmhurst Hospital For Not Having Bigger Parking Lot appeared first on SpinTaxi Magazine.

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