Metro-North passengers buy train tickets at Grand Central Terminal. PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN JONAS GRUEN/GETTY

Even as rescue teams were sifting through the wreckage of the horrific Metro-North crash last Tuesday—the crumpled Mercedes S.U.V., the molten train coaches—many wondered about the state of mind of Ellen Brody, the motorist who found herself trapped between the crossing arm and the train tracks in Valhalla, New York, in Westchester. Brody was a much respected and highly responsible person (spouse, mom, jewelry-store employee)—and a careful driver, too. In the minutes before the accident, she seemed calm and deliberate. She climbed out of her vehicle to try to dislodge the guard rail and then settled back in, long enough—Rick Hope, the motorist behind her, speculated—to refasten her seat belt. And yet Brody, with time and room to back up, instead drove across the tracks, directly into the path of a train hurtling through at its normal speed, sixty miles per hour. “The thing’s dinging, red lights are flashing, it’s going off,” Hope told the Times. “I just remember going, ‘Hurry up.’ I just knew she was going to back up—never in my wildest dreams did I think she’d go forward.”

Did Brody, in her panic, mistakenly put the car into drive instead of reverse, or calculate that she could make it through the intersection? No one could say. “Very little is actually known about what causes accidents,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in “Epidemic on the Highways,” his pioneering essay on highway safety, published in 1959. “But all that is known points to the conclusion that accidents result when drivers find themselves in situations to which they cannot respond correctly, either because their minds don’t work fast enough or simply because it’s ‘too late.’ ”

In Westchester, where I’ve lived since 1990, Brody’s fatal error elicited sympathy, including from confident drivers. Even the most practiced of us know how fraught just a routine excursion can be. At a news conference that night, Rob Astorino, the Westchester County executive, said that his own daily commute is similar to the one that Brody was making, with a stretch along Commerce Street, where Brody’s troubles came. Commerce bends through a cemetery and also has access to two major highways, the Bronx River Parkway and the Taconic State Parkway. The intersections and turns are “very confusing for drivers,” Astorino said. In daylight, he meant. For Brody, the pressure was greater. She was navigating in the dark, and was at the head of a line of vehicles, some of them seeking alternatives to the Taconic, less than two hundred feet away, where a collision had happened not long before, sealing it off as a route.

The paradox of Westchester—its lure and deception—is captured in its antiquated, overcrowded tangle of bucolic “parkways”: the Bronx River, Cross County, the Sprain Brook, the Merritt, the Saw Mill, the Taconic—almost every mile created by Robert Moses in the twenties and thirties, when Connecticut, Long Island, and Westchester all had the ambition, or pretension, of being not mere suburbs but “the country.” It’s the same fantasy nurtured in the period’s great, giddy screwball comedies, which often include escape-from-the city driving idylls. A bemused Cary Grant and a pixilated Irene Dunne or Katharine Hepburn fumble toward romance in an open “roadster,” filmed on sets, with backdrop footage of trees and brooks, and with “funny” staged accidents—a harmless plunge into a ditch or a gentle ramming into the rickety local farm truck, with its laconic yokel driver and his meshed coop of squawking chickens.

Today those roads—the actual ones—are still charming. But they are also treacherous: the twisty access lanes, the narrow shoulders, the cryptic and poorly placed signage. And it’s not just the highways. In Tarrytown, where I live, our little cross-hatching of streets is a pile-up waiting to happen: intersections choked with trucks rumbling off the Tappan Zee Bridge (designed to last fifty years, and now in a stage of decrepitude); vehicles clogging Route 9, the single artery that connects the county’s river towns. Impatient local drivers—my neighbors—escalate the tension. Pause a micro-second too long at a changing light and the motorist behind you will be leaning on the horn, even in foul conditions of rain or snow or fog. Drivers commonly barrel through crosswalks, indifferent to scurrying pedestrians, who by law have the right of way. Even the new stop signs don’t help.

It’s all a symptom of suburban congestion—and, perhaps, also of a blighted dream, as life “in the country” increasingly replicates the ills of the city left behind. We, too, have our growing pockets of poverty, our homeless and jobless, our undocumented immigrants hiding in shadows (when not shovelling our driveways).

Well, nothing new there: the car as symbol of America’s rise and fall. But the Harlem-line disaster was, most disturbingly, a car-meets-train disaster: the engineer trying to brake as the S.U.V. loomed squarely in his sights. To many of our fellow-citizens, the idea of commuting by rail seems archaic, or even un-American. (Never mind the marvels of high-speed rail in Europe and Asia.) To get somewhere, the thinking goes, you should be in the driver’s seat, with your own hands on the wheel. But, in fact, the American romance of rapid transit—of speed and freedom, of the beckoning open thoroughfare—began with trains. And, back in the day, we approached this novelty in our novel American fashion. “American railroads were constructed in the quickest way, and with little regard to safety, comfort, or durability,” Daniel Boorstin writes in “The National Experience,” the second volume of his trilogy “The Americans.” Charles Dickens, on his famous stateside visit, in 1842, “found his first ride in an American train of the Boston & Lowell line a terrifying experience. Generally foreigners touring the United States by rail were appalled by the frequency of accidents and still more amazed that Americans should accept them as routine.”

Boorstin reproduces the account of another Englishman, Charles Richard Weld, who made a harrowing trip by train from Cumberland, West Virginia, to Washington, D.C., in 1855. It began with a warning from the conductor that he was behind schedule and would have to make up for lost time. As the train swayed around hairpin curves, passengers clutched at seat backs and angled their legs so as to lessen the shock to their knees, should the crash come, as it inevitably did. “When Weld crawled from the wreckage he saw that all cars except half the middle car and the engine had been smashed,” Boorstin writes. “Rails were either wholly wrenched from their sleepers or rolled into snakeheads. Weld’s terror turned to indignation when he found none of his fellow passengers willing to join him in complaining of the recklessness of the conductor. On the contrary, most of them praised the conductor’s efforts to arrive on time.”

Just as New York State highways are the creaking remnants of a vanished dream, its rail system also seems stuck in the past. In the aftermath of this most recent accident, we learned that only two of the nation’s eighteen state or local railways, Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road, operate on a third-rail system powered by overhead lines. And while the frequency of accidents at crossings has lessened in other parts of the country, they remain hazardous in New York. (Metro-North has a hundred and twenty-five grade crossings in addition to the one that Ellen Brody blundered through.)