Data: Traffic on 3 LI highways getting worse

Data Point

A holiday gift nobody wants: more congested roads

Anyone who has taken to the region’s roads recently would likely agree that traffic is getting worse again, a trend likely to continue during this holiday season. Now we have confirmation of what Long Island drivers have been experiencing, via the latest data that shows the region has lots of company in its congestion misery.

Traffic levels are up nationwide, and could soon surpass pre-pandemic levels. Total driven miles during spring 2024 saw the sharpest year-on-year spike since 2021, according to a recent report by transportation analytics firm StreetLight.

The Point analyzed traffic data on three of Long Island’s major roads, collected by the New York State Department of Transportation, and found that Long Island mirrors nationwide trends.

The Long Island Expressway is the busiest road on Long Island. An average of 184,984 vehicles traveled each day between exits 33 and 34, both on the westbound and eastbound lanes, in 2023, the latest data available. This was an increase of 2.6% since 2022, and very close to the pre-pandemic average of 185,670 vehicles in 2019.

The Southern State Parkway, meanwhile, recorded a sharper increase in traffic volume. An average of 173,471 vehicles a day in 2023 traversed the road around exit 19. Not only was the 2023 traffic volume 7.4% higher compared with 2022, traffic surpassed pre-pandemic levels of 172,762 a day in 2019. The 25.5-mile parkway is among the deadliest roads on Long Island.

The 28-mile Northern State Parkway saw an average of 142,120 vehicles each day move both ways between exits 26 and 27 in 2023, up 4.3% from 136,322 vehicles in 2022.

Since increasing traffic is known to add stress for drivers, it’s worth noting that the state’s new congestion pricing plan for driving into Manhattan’s business district is set to begin in January, with the intention of incentivizing commuters to skip their cars and take public transit. Whether the plan actually launches and whether it has the desired effect remains to be seen.

— Karthika Namboothiri karthika.namboothiri@newsday.com

Pencil Point

The Santa clause

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Reference Point

The parking spot blues

Ah, parking. It can be a bane for Long Island drivers heading into many of the region’s downtowns, especially during the busy holiday shopping season.

Drivers with long memories know this is not just a modern annoyance. Newsday’s editorial board was monitoring the issue nearly 80 years ago when the villages of Hempstead and Rockville Centre were contemplating the introduction of parking meters to deal with "traffic bottlenecks and shopping problems."

The board noted that most village streets in Nassau County were laid out years before cars replaced horses as the primary non-walking form of transportation. "Citizens then were not forced to take their lives in their hands before crossing a rush-hour street," the board wrote on Dec. 12, 1945, adding that the end of World War II gas rationing also had led to "a resurgence of traffic snarls" that begged for some corrective measure.

Parking meters, however, were controversial.

"To date, the bulk of the opposition to installing meters has come from merchants," wrote the board, which summed up the protest argument this way: "Parking meters will drive customers away. Our stores will be empty. Our cash registers will lose their jingle. And Hempstead will no longer be the hub of Nassau."

The board tested that theory by contacting four communities that had recently resorted to meters — White Plains, New Rochelle and Mt. Vernon in New York and Montclair in New Jersey. All four faced similar protests, all of which faded after the meters were in place.

"Meters, it turned out, produced a greater turnover in the parking spaces, allowed more customers to get closer to the shops, and upped merchandising revenue to a gratifying figure," the board wrote. They also brought in what the board termed "highly interesting" revenue for the local governments — for example, a yearly average of $35,000 in White Plains, enough to run the city’s library. "That money could pay for a lot of things entirely beyond the reach of the current budget," Newsday’s board advised.

But the board also saw in the parking meter debate a bigger issue at play having to do with the haphazard way Long Island developed.

"Parking meters are needed in our bigger villages because Nassau developed heedlessly, without a plan. There is nothing we can do about the present situation except install remedial measures like meters and parking lots as quickly as we can," the board wrote. "The younger communities in Nassau — and in Suffolk — can make sure, however, that the same mess doesn’t creep up on them. Intelligent planning can make room for everybody without hanging a single parking field from the sky."

Today’s Long Islanders know all too well how that worked out.

— Michael Dobie michael.dobie@newsday.com

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