A Slow Crawl

It’s a refrain often repeated every summer: Traffic is worse this year than it’s ever been.

Perhaps this year it’s actually true. At almost any time, on any day of the week, drivers may find themselves in the middle of gridlock, unable to get anywhere quickly. An accident? Forget it.

Is it a result of a larger full-time population due to the pandemic? Maybe. Or possibly it’s just the inevitable culmination of the ever-growing build-out of the area, combined with a dearth of affordable housing, forcing more workers to move west and make the daily commute.

Gridlock was once reserved for morning and evening commutes, during the “trade parade,” when workers from up-island made their way east in the mornings to jobs on the East End, and west once the day was done. But the traffic nightmares have blossomed into an anytime affair.

Public officials and local lawmakers have promised to address the growing traffic crisis for years — think “cops and cones,” the widening of County Road 39, and various attempts to change traffic light patterns at major bottlenecks. A slew of proposed remedies have also been floated throughout the years, some fanciful: an express road in a ditch running alongside the railroad tracks, ferries, increased commuter rail service.

But for all the proposals and remedies, no panacea exists. The solution will be a host of minor and continuous changes and tweaks to the existing traffic patterns to try to ease the suffering of those on the road.

Which is why Southampton Town Supervisor Jay Schneiderman’s plan to form a traffic task force makes so much sense. The group will solicit ideas on ways to improve traffic that can be implemented by the town, as well as county and state lawmakers.

Every local municipality should have such a sitting committee, or have members be part of a regional one, if the traffic nightmare is going to be made better.

The East End is a community supported, in large part, by a tourist economy. But if those tourists can’t get from point A to point B comfortably, they will quickly find somewhere else to spend their dollars. And if the workers making their way east have to spend an extra four hours on the road every day, they, too, will abandon the area.

In light of this summer’s traffic, it’s time for our lawmakers to put their feet on the gas and start implementing fixes — no matter how small — to loosen the years-long gridlock. Get moving.