County has ideas for Long Beach Road

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Nassau County Legislators Denise Ford and Howard Kopel hosted a forum on the current Long Beach Road traffic study at Oceanside Middle School on Nov. 17. About 40 people attended.

While officials and consultants were there to discuss their ideas for reducing traffic on Long Beach Road, attendees voiced their concerns about the planned Costco in Oil City and the effect it would have on traffic.

Harold Lutz, director of transportation for Gibbons, Esposito & Boyce Engineers P.C., the consulting firm that carried out the study, mentioned a number of ways to better direct traffic and prevent accidents on Long Beach Road. His team studied the road from Sunrise Highway, in Rockville Centre, to the Long Beach Bridge — a total of 4.5 miles.

“There’s no one solution that we’re going to propose throughout the corridor of this that’s going to work for everything,” said Lutz. “There are multiple solutions. Some things work in multiple locations. Some things it’s a combination of alternatives and ideas …”

The ideas for improvement that were mentioned included narrowing the road’s lanes, widening sidewalks, removing street parking, timing traffic signals differently and creating left-turn lanes. Lutz mentioned curb “bulb-outs” at certain intersections and at the Stuart Place school crossing. Bulb-outs are extended sections of sidewalk with a highly visible crosswalk, which makes pedestrians more visible to drivers while shortening the time they take crossing the street.

Lutz also addressed speeding on Long Beach Road. “We’re looking to implement traffic-calming measures,” he said. “We’re looking to slow down traffic. We’re not necessarily looking to stop traffic or create stops, but we’re looking to get the attention of the driver, to get them to realize maybe how fast they actually are going, and that their speed is really not safe for the condition that they’re driving in.”

Lutz also mentioned that over the past three years, 83 percent of the more than 1,200 accidents on Long Beach Road occurred between the intersections of Lincoln Avenue and Duncan Place, and Empire and Austin boulevards, a distance of just 2.3 miles.

After the presentation, residents spoke about their own traffic concerns — mainly the impact that a Costco might have on Long Beach Road traffic. Lutz said that his team did take that into account by considering Costco’s traffic study along with the county’s own study.

Costco’s study, he said, was more realistic than studies he has seen in the past. “They made certain assumptions that were very conservative in nature,” Lutz said. “So, as a traffic engineer and as a reviewer of traffic impact studies, I could tell you that they did put together a conservative analysis, as opposed to many studies that I’ve looked at [which] are the very opposite.”