Suffolk Closeup: Our columnist files an accident report

Bang! There I was, stopped, sitting in a traffic jam on Route 58 in Riverhead two weeks ago, and bang!

It felt like my Toyota Prius was collapsing. My little car was struck by an auto that had been behind me, it having been hit by a vehicle behind it. And then my car was pushed into a car in front of it in the pile-up.

No one was hurt. But as Phil Hattorff, the owner of Phil’s Auto & Truck Repair whose tow truck carried my car away commented at the scene, my Prius was “totaled.” My insurance company, Allstate, subsequently determined the same thing.

The Prius is made with a lot of plastic that keeps it light and it gets phenomenal mileage.

At the scene of the accident, I thought of the tank of a car I had decades ago, an Oldsmobile 88 (a gift from my father who had owned it) and thought it would have done better in this kind of accident, not totaled.

The Prius was not struck with extreme force. The airbag didn’t inflate. But the force was enough to leave a back wheel at a sharp angle and part of the rear end a mess, pushed in, its plastic portion compacted, some turned into a blob. As a kind of commentary by the car, its Toyota emblem in front had popped off.

However, when I suggested the issue of a lack of heftiness in cars today in a post-crash conversation with one of the Allstate agents I spoke to, a man with long experience with vehicular crashes, he emphasized that today’s lighter cars “are a lot safer” than vehicles of years ago. The “lighter metals and plastic” cause an impact to be “dispersed through the car.”

So, the force is “dissipated.” This is done by design, he said. The “lighter alloys and plastic” with which autos are made now are “crunched” in a crash. Thus, the power of the impact is absorbed. He said when cars were heavy, like the Olds 88, the impacts of crashes — one heavy vehicle flying into another — resulted in “worse injuries” to drivers and passengers in the vehicles involved.

But in turn, the fate of autos themselves today is their getting crunched.

Regarding Route 58 in Riverhead, I’ve never been comfortable riding on it. There’s a lot of competition in Suffolk County about the highways and records of accidents. Route 58 has had a notable string of vehicles hitting pedestrians trying to cross it, some of whom were killed.

I put the question to that fount of information nowadays, Google: Is Route 58 in Riverhead especially dangerous?

What came up were a few items saying it is.

There was a 2022 essay on RiverheadLOCAL in which John Fallot, who described himself as a “product designer and visual designer based in both Riverhead and Brooklyn,” wrote under a heading “Why Route 58 Is Terrible,” that “‘stroads’ are street-road hybrids. Roads are high speed connections between two places. Streets are a complex environment in which people interact and engage in commerce. Stroads, in attempting to be both complex and fast-paced, are neither. Route 58 is a capital-S Stroad … The few sidewalks that do exist are along shoulder-less car lanes, often with semis and pickups barreling past.”

On Reddit, there was a posting in 2023 from someone identifying himself or herself as “rlongisland,” under a subject line “What’s the worst road on Long Island?” who responded: “Route 58 in Riverhead. It’s the gateway to the twin forks and home to a gazillion stores, so there are so many people passing through at all hours of the day. There are only two narrow lanes on each side. Combine that with the fact that there’s red lights seemingly every 200 feet …”

I remember the first time I saw downtown Riverhead, as a boy in the 1950s. My family would camp during summers in nearby Wildwood State Park in Wading River. Being from New York City, I viewed downtown Riverhead as a nice country town.

As the decades went by, Route 58, to the north of downtown Riverhead, became the site of massive development, extremely dense strip zoning — maybe not with “a gazillion stores” but many, very many, big box stores in shopping centers along it. A complaint has been that they’ve taken business from downtown Riverhead.

This concentration of commerce on Route 58, which also includes cars darting from its shopping centers, can make traveling on it dicey.

Of course, I was hardly traveling on it. I was at a standstill in traffic, not a rare situation on Route 58.

Minutes after the crash, Riverhead Town Police Department officers arrived and did a highly competent job dealing with the mess, directing traffic around the accident scene and getting tow trucks in to quickly carry the affected vehicles away. Also, a police accident report was written and I was given a copy.

I was assigned to the tow truck that came from Phil’s on Northville Turnpike, pretty close by. There was no room for me in the tow truck. But a kindly Riverhead police officer had me jump into the back of his squad car and drove me to Phil’s. It was my first time ever riding in a squad car.

“At least you weren’t hurt,” said a woman at Phil’s, a very sensible observation, as I arrived to wait there for my wife to come and rescue me.

If you are in an accident in which, as the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles states, “a person is injured or killed, or there is damage to the property of one individual including yourself that exceeds $1,000,” you must fill out a DMV form. This was in addition to the Riverhead Town Police Department report.

I sent this by certified mail to the DMV in Albany. I had taken the filled-out form to the Riverhead office of the DMV, which is on Route 58 near where the crash occurred, but was told it could not be accepted there, that it needed to be mailed to a post office box of the DMV in Albany.

Later, I surrendered the license plates of the car to the DMV Riverhead office. I noted why I was there to a receptionist. Of Route 58, she said it can be “scary.”

The Prius after several days was taken from Phil’s to a vast lot I never knew existed along Montauk Highway in the hamlet of Brookhaven. It’s an operation of a company called Copart that is partnered with Allstate. The lot was loaded with a mass of damaged cars. Allstate has an office right next to Copart’s lot.

The office’s title in big letters on a wall: “Suffolk Total Loss Office.”

After I signed over the title of the Prius to an Allstate representative, he arranged to have $3,566 transferred through a debit card to our bank. That was the settlement arrived at by Allstate (my insurance carrier since I was 19), based on the age and mileage of the car. I paid $22,000 for the Prius in 2010.

My Prius had a good life. A hybrid electric/gas-powered car that got 50 miles a gallon, at its demise it had a little over 240,000 miles on its odometer. And in all those miles there never was a major repair, just lube and oil and two bouts of new tires.

At 150,000 miles, a service adviser at Riverhead Toyota, located maybe three miles on Route 58 from the accident site, declared that my Prius had “good bones.”

So, RIP Prius — the best car I ever had.