Friday, July 11, 2025
As concern grows over the increasing number of fatalities on the roads of Nassau and Suffolk counties, it’s worth considering how transportation decisions made 100 years ago continue to contribute to today’s driving dangers.
The carnage on the parkways and expressways is largely the product of Long Island’s original sin: enormous resources lavished on road construction and a comparative pittance spent on bus and train infrastructure.
Had New York State builder-supreme Robert Moses directed a better-balanced share of public funds to public transit, driving would surely have become a less common form of conveyance. And with fewer cars on the roads, crashes would have occurred less often. Hundreds of the 2,100 lives lost on Long Island in the past decade could have been saved and many of the 16,000 injuries prevented.
Moses’ privileging of motor vehicle travel can perhaps be excused in retrospect as the inevitable outgrowth of the car-crazed era in which he lived. But it isn’t as though alternate visions were lacking in the 1920s, ‘30s and beyond. It’s just that the intellectually arrogant Moses rejected them as “stupid, long-winded, contentious and impractical.”
That curt dismissal is quoted in “The Power Broker,” Robert Caro’s magisterial biography on Moses. Planners not beholden to the car czar came to realize, Caro writes, that “the more highways were built to alleviate congestion, the more automobiles would pour onto them and congest them and thus force the building of more highways.”
And that is exactly what has happened on Long Island — with heartbreaking results.
Moses’ own vision of a lacy network of “parkways” — tree-lined roads free of commercial traffic and adjacent development — was fully achieved due to his unbridled political power. And he designed the Northern State, Southern State and all his other parkways with low-clearance bridges to ensure that only cars would be able to use them. Many of these roads were built to afford access to Long Island’s alluring beaches, but the large number of New Yorkers without cars could not reach them on buses.
The expressways that Moses also constructed did allow commercial traffic. But he again made sure that they would be used only by drivers.
More far-sighted planners had urged that a railway be built on the median of the Long Island Expressway. It would have been the centerpiece of an expanded Long Island Rail Road system that could have included freight trains. That would, in turn, have encouraged local siting of businesses employing thousands of workers who would no longer have needed to drive to and from jobs in Manhattan.
Moses didn’t want that to happen, however — and so it did not.
Similarly, experts at the Regional Plan Association suggested in the 1930s that the Whitestone Bridge be designed to accommodate train tracks. They would have efficiently linked Long Island with the Bronx, Westchester and Connecticut. But because Moses vetoed that idea as well, the only direct way to reach Nassau and Suffolk from the north would be via cars. “And this would condemn Long Island to future inundation by larger and larger numbers of automobiles,” Caro observes.
Because of this conscious determination to create a car-centric transportation system, Nassau and Suffolk drivers face not only elevated risks of being killed or injured, but they also waste serious amounts of time and money and experience constant frustrations of being stuck in traffic jams.
This sad story will not have a happy ending.
Long Island can never entirely undo the damage that Moses and his enablers inflicted on it. “Build railroads at the same time that you were building roads,” Caro says of the pivotal period in the mid-20th century, “and solving the transportation problem would be greatly simplified. Pour all available funds into roads without building railroads, and that problem would never be solved.”
And so drivers on Long Island are left to take their chances along “Blood Alley” on the Southern State and “Dead Man’s Curve” on the Cross Island Parkway.
Just as there will be no resurrections of the 2,100 people killed on Long Island roads between 2014 and 2023, there’s no returning to the time when the transport system could have been designed rationally and humanely.
Kevin J. Kelley, of Atlantic Beach, is a retired journalist and journalism professor.
