Long Island Expressway Exit 53 overhaul completed, adding exit ramps

A pair of new exit ramps connecting the Long Island Expressway to Crooked Hill Road opened Wednesday, which state officials said will make commutes to Brentwood and the surrounding areas easier while reducing congestion.

The $27 million project, under construction since 2022, will ease traffic for commuters and residents in the Brentwood area where drivers have used service roads and intersections to access Crooked Hill Road and head to Smithtown and Islip.

The construction effort was "one of the most significant upgrades to the LIE since the addition of the high occupancy vehicle lanes in the 1990s," New York State Department of Transportation Commissioner Marie Therese Dominguez said Wednesday, standing under a tent at one of the new rain-dampened exits. She added that the new ramps are "a true game changer for absolutely everybody who lives and works here in central Suffolk County."

Crooked Hill Road offers access to Crooked Hill Commons and Commack Shopping Center, both in Smithtown, as well as Brentwood State Park and Suffolk County Community College’s Grant campus in Islip. Dominguez noted the project will also improve the commute for workers heading to the Hauppauge Industrial Park.

"What we've done is removed what had been a notorious bottleneck," she said.

As part of the construction project, crews added a second lane the length of the ramp from the eastbound lane of the LIE toward the southbound side of the Sagtikos State Parkway, as well as extended a third travel lane for traffic merging onto the southbound parkway to the G Road bridge. On the Sagtikos State Parkway, lanes for traffic merging from the LIE and from Pilgrim Psychiatric Center were extended southbound.

The project also included the installation of an over-height vehicle detection system, which Dominguez said uses a laser to detect vehicles that are too tall to clear overpasses and subsequently flashes lights signaling truck drivers to pull over. Dominguez added that bridge strikes have been increasing statewide and that this technology has been rolling out throughout the state, including here on Long Island.

Ryan Stanton, the executive director of the Long Island Federation of Labor, touted the construction project for creating 350 union jobs and its environmental impact. In addition to the roadwork, construction crews installed a water recharge basin on a 3½-acre plot of land to reduce area flooding and filter highway stormwater runoff.

"We are avoiding disaster at every turn when we do investments in retention pools," Stanton said.