LI Quality of Life Survey: Many dissatisfied with frequent traffic jams, road safety

Traffic jams are part of the reason Luke Heaton, a software developer from West Babylon, believes the quality of life is declining on Long Island.

"Every time I get in the car, I'm sitting in traffic. It doesn't matter where I'm going, what time — it’s stop and go," he told Newsday.

Heaton, 67, is one of many Long Islanders who rate the region poorly for traffic congestion, traffic safety and public transportation, according to Newsday’s recent survey with the Siena Research Institute.

A majority of residents (62%) believe traffic congestion is worse here than other places they are familiar with, the survey found.

And residents of Suffolk County are particularly dissatisfied with public transit and traffic safety — rating them "worse" rather than "better" by double-digit margins.

Taj Nemley-Edlow, 27, said she struggles to get from home in Amityville to work in Manorville because the Long Island Rail Road runs infrequently and Suffolk County Transit doesn’t offer buses for where she needs to go.

"When you don't have a car on Long Island, it's not convenient at all. It just makes things a million times harder," she said.

The survey polled 802 respondents between May 27 and June 16 on questions about their quality of life on Long Island. It had a margin of error of 4.3 points.

Roger Fluhr, 77, a lifelong Long Island resident from Wading River, said roadway aggression has contributed to a decline in the quality of life.

"What I'm seeing is ... a lot of people trying to bully people on the road," said Fluhr, a retired high school biology teacher. "On the expressway and the highways, people [are] using it as a slalom course, and you don't see police picking these people up."

Congestion

Siena pollster Don Levy said Long Islanders’ dissatisfaction with traffic congestion is pronounced, even compared with other national-level surveys he’s conducted.

"And that doesn't surprise me. Long Island obviously is a more dense area than many places," he said.

Sam Schwartz, a traffic engineer and former New York City traffic commissioner, said traffic congestion is not easy to fix in a place like Long Island.

"You're constrained by water on two sides, and you're adjacent to the busiest metropolitan area in the United States," he said. "Long Island has pretty much the same road infrastructure it's had for 25 years, and except for very few cases, it isn't much improved from the 1970s."

Heaton said part of the problem he sees driving in West Babylon is too much new housing going up.

"We've reached a saturation point in terms of the roads that we have and the ability to accommodate all the people that are driving," he said.

But Schwartz said new development that is oriented around public transit is needed.

"The prospect for relief is not there unless Long Island decides to do something different, and that would include a lot of transit-oriented development near train stations, so people don't have to rely on their cars, and to improve the transit services that they have," he said.

Rocky Moretti of TRIP, a Washington-based transportation research nonprofit, pointed to some smaller-scale changes to roadways that could reduce congestion.

"Improvements can be really modest, from improved traffic signalization to adding turn lanes or switching to double turn lanes on busy intersections and also improving [crash] incident management," he said.

Public transit

Suffolk residents gave public transit low marks in the poll, rating it "worse than other places" by a 17-point margin. In Nassau, where the Long Island Rail Road is more frequent and the NICE bus system is more expansive than Suffolk County Transit, the "worse" and "better" votes were roughly tied.

Nemley-Edlow said she appreciates that Suffolk County buses are usually on-time and now offer free Wi-Fi, but she wishes they went more places.

Safety

When it comes to traffic safety, Suffolk residents also rated the Island poorly — 40% said it’s worse, compared with 23% who said it’s better than elsewhere. As Newsday has previously reported, Suffolk often leads the state in annual traffic deaths, and in 2023 had a per capita traffic death rate nearly four times New York City’s.

In Nassau, which had a rate half Suffolk’s, roughly equal numbers of residents said traffic safety is "worse" and "better" than other places.

Across the Island, crashes killed 2,100 people and seriously injured another 16,000 over the decade ending in 2023. In just one year, crashes cost over $3.4 billion in health care and automobile expenses, insurance, legal fees and lost time and wages, Newsday has reported in its ongoing Dangerous Roads series.