Driving on Long Island: Central to our lives, one of our biggest dangers

When I interviewed for an internship at Newsday more than 25 years ago, one question was more urgent than the rest:

"Do you have a car?" an editor asked. If the answer wasn't yes, I'd probably be doing something else today.

It’s as true now as it was then: Driving is central to the way Long Islanders live. And, because of that, driving too often has a role in the way Long Islanders die.

In 2023 alone, there were six times as many traffic deaths as homicides in Nassau and Suffolk, as my colleagues Peter Gill and Arielle Martinez reported. After drug overdoses, car crashes were the leading cause of "accidental deaths" on Long Island over the past decade for people under 80, according to Centers for Disease Control Data. For 5- to 19-year olds, it was the leading cause.

With horrific car crashes so frequently in the news, it can be easy to become hardened to their devastating consequences. And it can be hard to accept them as an inevitable risk that comes with living in a long, flat suburbia connected from west to east by Long Island Expressway.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. While eliminating car crashes may be out of reach, solutions exist to reverse a decade-long rise nationally, and to flatten the spike in fatal accidents on Long Island over the last five years.

Getting to those solutions is the driving force behind Dangerous Roads — a yearlong Newsday investigative series that aims to get to the root of Long Island’s car crash epidemic. We share the stories of the lives destroyed by the problem, and discuss ways to fix it, whether by engineering solutions to make roads safer or strategies combating reckless behavior by drivers.

Every Long Islander has a stake in this conversation, and so we want you to be a part of it. Share your experiences, ideas and feedback at roads@newsday.com, and share this newsletter with everyone you know. You can also find a map of Long Island crashes and a Newsday database of fatal crashes.

I’ll be back each week with my insights as a transportation reporter, Long Islander and dad, as well as contributions from colleagues around the newsroom. I want this to be two-way traffic, so please reach out.

And drive safely.

Behind the stories: 'Indebted' to those who share heartbreak

I asked fellow Newsday transportation reporter Peter Gill to share his insights on working on the first story in the Dangerous Roads project. Here are some of his thoughts:

"Too often, I think we as a society focus on the scariest risks to our lives — things like murders, airplane crashes and the like — rather than the greatest dangers, like traffic crashes.

Every fatal crash can ripple through lives and families for years or decades afterward.

Kyle Porterfield and Iesha Kyles told us about losing their son, Amir Porterfield, a Copiague High School student who was hit and killed on Sunrise Highway in 2023. Amir was by all accounts a special kid: a football player, an amateur baker and a good friend. As she grieved for her son, Iesha was unable to work and lost her job, then her home — a sequence of events that anyone could empathize with. She's since found a new job and apartment, but still feels like a piece of her heart is missing.

It obviously wasn't easy for the parents to tell their story — they both broke down and cried as we spoke — but they felt it was important to share.

'If nothing's done, then it's gonna happen again,' Kyle said.

I'm indebted to Iesha and Kyle, as well as all of the other families who are speaking to us for this ongoing series."

Head over to Newsday.com for full coverage of Long Island’s Dangerous Roads.

By Alfonso A. Castillo

alfonso.castillo@newsday.com@alfonsoreports

Alfonso Castillo has been reporting for Newsday since 1999 and covering the transportation beat since 2008. He grew up in the Bronx and Queens and now lives in Valley Stream with his wife and two sons.