March 2008

Long Islanders Face Challenges Getting Around
STORY BY SARAH LANSDALE & AMY HAGEDORN

Where are you at 8:30 am on a Monday morning? Sitting in traffic on your way to work with thousands of other Long Islanders?

Since the 1950's, Long Islanders have relied on cars to get from home to the store or home to work. According to the Regional Plan Association, there are about 7 million trips made daily on Long Island and only 7% are made using public transportation.

Our transportation choices have profound effects on our lives -where we live, work and shop and the kind of air and water quality we enjoy.

There are consequences for the regional economy as well. The Partnership for New York City determined that more than $13 billion a year is lost in the New York Metropolitan Region as a direct result of traffic congestion and lost productivity, sitting in traffic. This is highly inefficient.

Relying on cars alone to get from place to place results in time wasted in traffic instead of time being with family and friends. Commuters are affected every day, but so are parents who become chauffeurs for their children and children who become reliant on the chauffeuring. The elderly who live in neighborhoods that lack other options often become isolated from the resources they need.

Knowing all this, we still drive. At Long Island's First Annual Sustainability Conference in April 2007, 87% of conference attendees said that when they imagine the Long Island Expressway in the year 2030 at 8:30 am they would prefer to experience less congestion than today, yet later in that same survey, when asked how they see themselves traveling in 2030, most said it was by car. These answers do not match up and we think it's because many Long Islanders don't see public transportation as cost effective, convenient or reliable.

For decades, public transit has struggled to compete with automobiles. Why? Are we simply accustomed to driving or have we been conditioned to think traveling by car is superior to traveling by bus or train? More public money is spent to facilitate auto traffic than is spent on public modes of travel. Not to mention that auto companies spent $8 billion on direct marketing advertising in 2007, which translated into $77.8 billion in sales. Those numbers are expected to rise to $9.8 billion and $108.1 billion, respectively, by 2012, according to a new study from the Direct Marketing Association. These are tough numbers for the MTA to compete with.

So, if we know that public transportation is better for our environment and economy, is inefficient and Long Islanders hate sitting in traffic-what are our solutions? Here are some ideas that people are talking about:

1. Widen or deck the Long Island Expressway, Northern State and Southern State and all major roads in between. Building more, or onto existing, highways was the solution over 50 years ago that yielded the Long Island Expressway –commonly dubbed as the world’s longest parking lot. Back in the 1950’s the state highway engineer Joseph Darcey took notice that the state highways were increasingly congested on weekdays. Darcey said, “We cannot solve our problem just by widening and improving existing highway routes. The ultimate solution will come only by building a new, modern expressway or throughway on entirely new locations;”that ultimate solution: the Long Island Expressway.

Adding extra lanes to streets and highways, and building new routes is a short-term fix. It's like the mantra, "if you build it, they will come."

2. Change the way communities are built; create links with transportation. The Rauch Foundation's 2008 Long Island Index concluded that many Long Islanders are open to the idea of living in downtowns. The suburban ideal of a single-family home with a yard no longer suits the wants and needs of every Long Islander. The preference for downtown living is linked to the convenience of transportation options in a downtown —residents can walk, or catch a bus or train to the places they need to be.

Next time there's a development planned in your community, ask, where's the nearest bus route or train station? Are there easy ways to connect to existing stores or neighboring communities?

3. Take public transportation. Long Island has an extensive bus system and one of the world's largest commuter rail systems. Newsday recently reported that in 2007 ridership on the Long Island Rail Road hit a record high with 86.1 million passengers. Unfortunately, the LIRR is geared towards getting people in and out of the city. We need to think about retrofitting the system so that it meets our intra-Island commuting needs as well.

The 2008 Long Island Index also looked at transfer times -how convenient is it to catch a bus to a train? In most cases these are not practical for a commuter. By scheduling these to work together both could become great solutions.

The solutions that work will rely on what we do as individuals. Even if we had the perfect public transportation system and thriving downtowns from Elmont to Montauk, none of this will matter unless we use other options beyond getting into our cars. Individually, we all have an impact. Transportation options are available if we seek them out and creating communities with access to transit becomes possible if we engage in the planning process.

Tell us what you think about public transportation. Do you use it? If so, what is your experience? How could you be persuaded to use public transportation more readily? Is there a place you've visited where you've enjoyed using public transportation?
Drop us an email at stuttle@sustainableli.org

Amy Hagedorn, president of the board, and Sarah Lansdale, executive director, head up the team at Sustainable LI (www.sustainableli.org), a non-profit organization that focuses on facilitating real change in our region by promoting the concepts and practices of sustainable development. Sustainable specializes in a community-based planning process in which residents, municipal leaders, businesspeople and all interested stakeholders come together to plan and implement sustainable development initiatives in their communities.