Public Transit By Default - Can It Stay?

By Dan Rattiner

When the county announced that it would embark on a construction effort to add another lane to County Road 39 that bypasses Southampton, just about everybody swung into action to help commuters find alternate ways to get to and from work every weekday without using the road.

It's been a remarkable effort. And the traffic on County Road 39, which might have ballooned into traffic jams of nightmare proportions since this is the only way in and out of the Hamptons, never happened.

The railroad did its part by adding two new eastbound trains from Speonk to Montauk, leaving at approximately 6 and 7 a.m. (check the time for your station) to help people get to work. The Hampton Jitney added a "last chance" bus so people who missed the train at the end of the workday could still get home at night. And other county busses were added to meet the trains at the stations and take the passengers north and south to their worksites in good order. Incidentally, the county shuttle bus service this past week added still another bus, this time to pick up the schoolteachers and other workers who get out early at our local schools. The bus will leave the Springs school at 3:30 p.m., then follow a route to stop at the other schools in that town and then schools in the Southampton districts, then the LIRR stations in Hampton Bays, Westhampton and Speonk.

The big elephant in the room is what will happen in May of 2008 when the construction is completed and the opportunity arises to keep these busses and extra trains going as a vibrant and vigorous new public transport for this community.

Will the motoring public simply go back to using their cars, thus dropping the public transit ridership so badly that the services will cease operations?

If they do, it will be a shame in my opinion. There are all sorts of reasons why public transit should be an integral and permanent part of the life on the East End.

For one thing, there is the fact that adding a new lane to County Road 39 is just fine, but it will not be just fine for long. Five or ten years from now, if public transit is not continued, there will be a need to add still another lane. And in case you haven't noticed, there's no room for another lane.

Another thing is that it is simply the right thing to do, continuing on with public transportation. People have gotten used to using it. It's a successful service during the construction. And this is the time for us to do something up close and local about global warming and the burning of fossil fuels. Public transit is the way to go.

And the third thing is that this community has been fiddling with the idea of adding public transit for at least fifteen years. There has been proposal after proposal. Now, due to a crisis, we suddenly have public transport in place. And it works. Keep it.

Last spring, when it was announced that the traffic cone program that provided a temporary third lane would be abandoned come autumn so they could build a permanent third lane, I wrote an article comparing the work that was about to be done with the amazing speed with which a collapsed overpass in Oakland, California was repaired. It was done in 17 days. I suggested that the construction on County Road 39 could be done in less than a month, if it wasn't for the fact that Suffolk County was notorious for overruns in construction and delays in construction, so this was scheduled to take nine months. I predicted it would take ten months or more, and it would be going on all through the summer of 2008.

Well, also last week, the County Department of Public Works Commissioner, Gilbert Anderson, announced that due to mild weather in the autumn, and also due to the light traffic that was on County Road 39 because of the new temporary public transit service designed to ease congestion there, the project would be completed a month early. They now expect to have it finished in April instead of in May. So I eat my words.

And so this is the time to consider continuing the bus, train and shuttle service temporarily put into effect this winter. I suggest the County start with a five-month extension of the public transit, from May to September, to see how it goes. And I suggest that now the County begin planning a massive advertising and marketing campaign to make the public aware that they intend to do this.

Perhaps with a little help from those who have gotten used to using the service, and a little help from socially conscious people who realize this is a remarkable opportunity, the public transit in our community will be left in place permanently.

At the very least, it will head off a massive traffic problem on County Road 39 that will surely begin again ten years from now.

And I also suggest that free wireless computer service be installed on all these public transit lines. It's inexpensive to do, and will allow travelers to use the time in their public transit commute to good effect.

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