Dan's Papers - October 13, 2006

The experts say that after a while, people tend to forget the bad things that happen to them and remember only the good. Thus there are the "good old days," which, if you think about them, weren't really.

In this context, I thought it would be important to point out four very interesting facts about the six weeks of hell that our County Supervisor Steve Levy just put those who work in the Hamptons through.

Last June, our local county legislator Jay Schneiderman came up with the idea of using traffic cones to create a second eastbound lane to solve the morning County Road 39 traffic jam commute for workers driving to work. In an eight-week experiment, Schneiderman showed that it worked. His boss, Supervisor Levy, then scrapped this solution for a very expensive different one that made the traffic even worse than it had been before they brought in the traffic cones.

Thus came the six weeks of hell, and I bet there are many funny but awful stories about what happened during the six weeks without the cones. But now the cones are back. And except for the stories, one supposes all is forgotten.

Did you ever wonder what this morning traffic jam cost every day? Here are some numbers.

The delay that every commuting motorist had to endure for the six weeks of Levy Hell was about an hour. It didn't matter how far you drove before you got into Levy Hell. Or where you had to go further east after Levy Hell. The delay between Shinnecock and the eastern side of Southampton, a distance of about ten miles, was an hour.

Tom Neely, the Southampton Town Transportation Commissioner, who has no control of what happens on county roads, told me that in one hour, about 2,000 cars pass any given point on County Road 39 when things are moving smoothly. Of course, when you are not moving at all, there is nothing to report moving past any given point, but the figure of 2,000 per hour will give you a rough scale of the situation.

The morning commute takes three hours. 2,000 cars times three hours is 6,000 cars, so that is the approximate size of the commute as far as cars go. With an average of two people per car, that means there were about 12,000 people delayed every day. This represents about 15% of the population. So oh yes, there are going to be all sorts of stories, told for a while in a jovial way to make you laugh about how terrible it was, and then, after about a year forgotten about. Those were the days.

So I figure the additional and unnecessary costs of this traffic jam involved an hour of extra gas for 6,000 cars, and an hour of unnecessarily wasted time at an average pay of, say, $20 an hour for 12,000 people - which is the amount they lose from work.

6,000 cars each use, on average, three gallons of gas an hour. At $3 a gallon, that is $9 per car for a total of $54,000.

12,000 workers at $20 an hour wasted is $240,000.

And so, the direct costs of having this one hour traffic jam each day is $295,000. And each week it is $295,000 times five or $1,475,000.

At the present time, the State, the County, the Town and the Feds are squabbling over who should pick up the direct extra cost in police and highway department worker expenses for putting out the cones and then taking them down, which, I am told, is $7,000 a week. I've been told that this cost was one of the factors that Levy considered in canceling the traffic cone system. As you can see, the cost is negligible when compared to the damage done.

The second thing I want you to take away from all of this is the very cumbersome name of this highway. County Road Thirty Nine is pretty long. And it is also boring. It is not in the same league as, say, the Freedom Trail or the Sunrise Highway. It's in the same league with the Governor Thomas E. Dewey Thruway, which is the name never actually said anymore for the New York State Thruway.

I propose we rename this road the Levy Hell Highway. Just to get back at him. I think those who have businesses along this road will be happy not to have County Road 39 on their stationery. And in a hundred years, people will just think Levy Hell will refer to some Jewish Dutchman who did something important, whatever it was.

Waste money, is what it was.

So now it is time to move on. And we forgive and forget and tell stories and then tell about the Good Old Days with the problems we had on the old County Road 39, and in Westhampton Beach a few years earlier, the great Sunrise Fire.

But here's the third thing I want you to think about. Various companies around the country make a huge machine with rubber wheels - it looks something like a professional hockey rink zamboni - that can be driven by a highway department employee to move concrete barriers in a very short time from one lane to another.

The machine, actually a sort of truck, has a hole on the left side of the front where the concrete barriers slide in as the truck moves along, and then a hole on the right side of the back where the conveyor belt slides the concrete barriers out, but one lane over.

It's an expensive truck, but not too expensive. How expensive can it be? It takes about an hour for this big truck to travel the ten miles from one end of the traffic jam to the other, slowly moving over the concrete barriers one lane. And that's the end of the problem. Such trucks are being used in, among other places, California, Massachusetts, and Oklahoma, and every day, twice a day, changing the one way direction of a particular lane on the Tappan Zee Bridge crossing the Hudson River in upstate New York. Here's a picture of the truck.

The last thing to think about with all this is something sad that I have to report. Every day, more people move to the Hamptons, more people get employed to work in the Hamptons and more people have to use the roads to get to the Hamptons.

The cone system works. The cars speed through. They even pass the devil-may-care SPEED LIMITS ENFORCED sign that is now up. But that is today. Tomorrow and the day after tomorrow are another matter. There will be more people and more cars on this single main artery leading into the Hamptons, and the truth be told, we do not have any more lanes to mess with here on the Levy Hell Highway.