The Jam We're In

Last Wednesday, a utility work crew thought the middle of morning rush hour was the best time to do some maintenance work along County Road 39, closing one eastbound lane. The result, not surprisingly, was a backup that stretched nearly to East Quogue, and bungled things up for much of the day.

It’s a fact: The traffic problem on the South Fork gets worse every year, and there are precious few workable solutions on the table. Credit Charlie McArdle, Southampton Town’s highway superintendent, and Southampton Village officials in particular for trying some things, hoping to hit on a silver bullet. In the past 12 months, more has been learned about the daily east-west quagmire than in many years before that.

There are, however, two truths that must be acknowledged.

First, do no harm. We’re well beyond the time when any municipality or utility can claim they were unaware of any potential negative effect of any work along the corridor during key travel times. It can’t happen — ever. There must be a clear line of communication involving state, county, town, villages and utility companies, to make clear what is acceptable and what isn’t, and to enforce limitations on activities that make things worse. If it doesn’t exist, it should be the top priority. Today.

Second, while we all have our pet ideas about ways to address the snarled traffic in East Hampton and Southampton towns — buried highways, tunnels, expressways along railroad tracks or utility lines, gondolas (yes, it’s been suggested by one letter writer, and it makes as much sense as anything else) — we must collectively identify the problem. There are simply too many vehicles.

This might not seem like a breakthrough. But it is the core problem: The region’s road infrastructure is simply overwhelmed. McArdle’s creative experiments have some merit, but ultimately you simply cannot “manage” 300 gallons per second going through a pipe designed to hold 200 gallons per second. All you can do is take steps to slow down the flow.

Sure, you can keep building more roads, more lanes. That’s been the strategy for more than a quarter century. All it has done is prove the rule: Any new space on the roads will fill in about eight years, tops. At that point, all you’ve done is make the pipe a little bigger, and turned the tap on higher yet.

Real solutions are going to address the root problem — and no one will like it. Manhattan has been a test case for congestion pricing, and, despite what you hear from President Donald Trump, it’s an unqualified success. The number of cars in Lower Manhattan has dropped by some 80,000 a day, public transportation ridership is way up and faster, and businesses are doing better than before the pricing plan was in place.

That doesn’t mean it’s a simple solution for the South Fork: Manhattan has public transportation options galore that offer timing flexibility to commuters and visitors alike, something the South Fork currently lacks. But it might well be one strategy, along with increasing nonvehicle infrastructure (trains, shuttle buses, bike lanes). In the end, we might not be able to “fix” the traffic problem we have. But it might hint at a better way forward.