Dan's Papers - October 19, 2007 - Public Transit Solution Emerges

Well, next week, we start the big experiment. While County Road 39, the only major traffic artery for the motoring public to travel in and out of the Hamptons is being repaired and widened over the next six months, everybody is jumping on the bandwagon to help out.

The railroad is running two new trains every weekday morning, leaving from Eastport and heading to Montauk with all the stops in between. More people on the train will mean fewer people on the highway. And so this is their contribution to lightening the load so the workmen can do their thing on County Road 39. The Hampton Jitney is also helping out, setting up some extra busses that will leave from Ronkonkoma. This also means more people using public transportation and fewer people on the roads. Finally, at the railroad stations in Westhampton, Hampton Bays, Southampton, Bridgehampton, East Hampton, Amagansett and Montauk, train and Jitney riders will be met by county busses that will take them to work. The people will get ferried in on public transit from west to east. The busses will take them north and south. The two routes make a pattern like the bones of a fish. Get it? South Fork? Get it?

In another traffic matter, some plans are moving ahead to rein in the noise made by all the billionaires who come into the area by helicopter. Too much noise over too wide of an area. There is talk about having them all follow the same flight path, sort of in single file instead of helter skelter all over the place as now.

I've got an idea. Why not have them fly in over County Road 39? Have them carry long steel chains with hooks on the bottom of them, and as they come in, if the pilot gets a signal that there is a traffic tie-up with the cars down below, they could just lower away until the hooks are attached firmly under the roof of some Mercedes or BMW, and then just lift it up and carry it out to the East Hampton Airport and set it down in the field on Daniels Hole Road.

We had all those shuttle busses in that field across from the entrance to the airport taking people to the Ross School this summer to enjoy the Billy Joel concert and the Prince concert and all the other concerts. So that could be another place to stream traffic heading west to east and shuttle busses taking people north to south. Well, south to their beach houses - again taking the pressure off County Road 39.

It could be sort of a random thing.

Oh look, isn't that Fred and Mary driving along in the traffic jam on County Road 39? Let's help them out.

So the people in that Mercedes get the hook, and maybe it turns out they're not Mary and Fred. But new friends are made.

The trains and Jitney busses and county shuttles handle the blue-collar workers and the helicopters and school busses help all the wealthy people. It's everybody helping everybody.

I got a call from Bunky Hearst in Bridgehampton earlier today. He lives in a house on Loper's Path that overlooks some farm fields. And he called to tell me that a farmer on a tractor, one John Halsey by name, got pulled over by police and given a ticket for trying to cross a road to get from one of his farm fields to another. He was ticketed for obstructing traffic.

What's the matter with these farmers? Getting in the way of progress like that. Serves them damn right. Don't they know farming is supposed to be an activity that is done just so the rich can LOOK at it? It's not supposed to be real farming. Everybody knows that.