Ever since a teenager died after falling through a large platform gap at the Woodside Long Island Rail Road station last summer, Newsday has had excellent coverage over the platform gap safety issue. On the Newsday website, there's an extensive "Investigating the Gap" section, complete with video, articles, and an amazing map.
The "How safe is your station?" map allows people to select a station (each is color-coded by number of injuries), which then leads to a pop-up window that shows photographs of how big the gaps are, offers downloads of accident reports, offers audio of people's incidents with huge platform gaps, lists how many injuries there have been between 200-2006, and what kinds of injuries there have been.
Yesterday, LIRR officials admitted that platform gaps exceeded "10 inches on 32 platforms at 22 LIRR stations." The LIRR plans to spend $13 million to fix them. The aunt of 19 year old Natalie Smead who died last summer criticized the LIRR's behavior before and during the accident. Judy Heefner said that conductors allowed her niece and her friends to drink alcohol on the train and didn't do enough after Smead fell through the gap. Smead died when a train hit her as she crawled across other train tracks to get up.
