Roosevelt Island drivers - not just those who live here, but those who visit - are being trained to ignore stop signs. It's a dangerous situation. The burden of blame falls on the Public Safety Department, but also on RIOC.

In the new section of Main Street, between the new buildings and the Tram station, there are four stop signs (two each direction of travel) that have no purpose whatsoever. There are no pedestrian crossings, no cross traffic, no hazards. Drivers recognize this, and accelerate right through the area, perhaps after a quick check in the rear-view mirror just in case an official vehicle might be following.

Those signs, one or two of which might be useful when construction resumes at Southtown, should be shrouded until they have a reason to be enforced. If they remain in view and continue to be ignored, it's likely they'll still be ignored when they are really necessary.

Meantime, drivers are being trained to ignore stop signs on Roosevelt Island.

On any day of the week, in fact, you can see drivers doing "kiss-the-brake stops" at stop signs in the Island's busiest residential area. On Friday and Saturday nights, you can often see cars actually speed up while going through the crosswalks supposedly controlled by the signs. (As it happens, they are usually the ones also pumping out music at an ear-splitting volume.)

Enforcement is essentially non-existent or, at best, rare and random. Until Public Safety starts doing its job on traffic enforcement, we can live, day to day, expecting a serious accident in a crosswalk.

Less threatening but far more annoying is Public Safety's unpredictable enforcement of parking regulations, and that goes beyond the silver-colored Toyota parked permanently in front of PS 217, unticketed, untowed, and rarely moved in what appears to be a storage situation. When parking-permit machines work only sporadically, and when PSD rarely, but selectively, hands out $115 parking-violation tickets, parking rules are going to be abused. That forces lots of drivers, who have a need for the parking spaces tied up by violators, to double-park. That turns a parking violation into a traffic hazard. It also means that simple necessity is training drivers to ignore another set of signs - the ones that read No Double Parking.

We can't be sure why that silver Toyota is semi-permanently stored in front of PS217 without jeopardy of a ticket or tow, while others shell out $115 for their transgressions. What we can be sure of is that Public Safety just isn't doing its job out there on Main Street - not on stop-sign enforcement, and not on parking enforcement.

DL