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Community members are begging officials to do something about traffic congestion and reckless drivers during the morning commute on Flanders Road.
In one cellphone video, a massive tractor-trailer hauling sod barrels down the center turning lane on Flanders Road.
In another, a solid stream of pickup trucks and cars speeds, illegally, down the middle lane, flying past cars stuck in the daily snail’s-pace morning commute through Flanders and Riverside.
Complaints about traffic are part of the fabric of the East End, but in Southampton Town’s middle class neighborhoods in Flanders and Riverside, community members are taking to social media with comments, criticism, and the question: Why can’t they do something?
Often, commenters speculate that if the traffic nightmare was happening elsewhere in the Hamptons, affecting the community’s more well-heeled neighbors, officials would address it.
Have they seen County Road 39? That was Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr.’s response when the point was raised to him. Traffic travail is everywhere on the two forks, he said, with the road through Southampton just as clogged and harrowing as the Flanders thoroughfare.
Thiele said he plans to pull together a meeting of community members, officials from the State Department of Transportation, State Police and Southampton Town next month to talk about Flanders Road, also known as State Route 24.
“Everybody points the finger at somebody else,” the lawmaker said. “The only way to get anything to happen is to get everybody in the same room.”
Like individuals who commented on the community Facebook page, Thiele made note of an improvement one day last week, when he and others saw Southampton Town Police “camped out” in the center lane ticketing drivers on Flanders Road.
But the department isn’t staffed to make that happen every day, said Police Chief Steven Skrynecki, who called putting a detail of officers on the road for enforcement little more than a Band-Aid.
“For me to constantly be writing a half dozen tickets is not going to make the problem go away,” he asserted. “Somebody needs to take the bull by the horns and get the right study done.”
Enhanced enforcement is, he said, “not even close to permanent.”
“We don’t have enough cops to cover all these areas, but that’s what we need. People are running through red lights so they don’t have to wait any longer, causing all the backups,” area resident Liz Berdinka offered.
She said she talked to a Department of Transportation representative recently and was told the problem may relate to the timing of traffic lights.
“However, this isn’t the only issue,” she said. “What is worse and far more dangerous are the drivers who use the center turning lane as an ‘HOV’ lane, just to bypass the parking lot of cars sitting on Flanders Road, causing a tremendous hazard to the cars trying to make legit turns, and also for the drivers who are trying to pull out of side streets. The situation is really, really bad.”
Colleen Carini has lived in Flanders for more than 30 years and “never have I seen the traffic issue as bad as it is currently,” she said. She noticed the change in congestion on Flanders Road when new lights were added. “The once-quiet side street I live on has become a cut-through and a bottleneck in the morning. I can’t even get out of my driveway. Litter is tossed from cars all over my road as well.”
Another resident who asked not to be identified said: “The children who are waiting for the bus on the side streets between 105 and Hampton Deli and on the main road are in danger from people who cut through the neighborhoods on both sides of the highway to get to the Hampton Deli. They are going to kill someone one day.
“I personally don’t think there is a solution,” she continue. “… People have to go to work and there are only so many roads you can take so there will always be traffic, but the blatant disregard for the laws and the residents and the other drivers is out of control. More police presence is needed.”
This week on social media, commenters noted school buses were late picking up students more and more often.
Police or not, Pleasure Drive, which runs between Flanders Road and County Route 104, becomes alternately a parking lot or a speedway. One social media participant said it was the worst he’d ever seen on Monday.
Residents have asked officials to change the lights to flashing yellow during the morning commute to improve flow. One noted there had been a sensor at the Oak Avenue intersection, but it seems to have been disabled. It can take seven to eight minutes before the light turns green, allowing people to turn onto Flanders Road, Berdinka said.
Jason Roche on Friday said the presence of traffic control officers made a difference. “No one drove crazy today everybody abided by the law,” he wrote. “Looks like traffic control people did a good job today, excellent. Next course of action: flashing yellow lights.”
Responding to constituents’ suffering with traffic townwide is like playing the carnival game “whack-a-mole,” Southampton Town Councilman Rick Martel said. A traffic calming strategy in one area sometimes simply sends the problem someplace else.
On Friday, Martel, too, mentioned increased police presence on Flanders Road. He reported seeing extra patrol cars there on Thursday when he was driving through during the late rush. He assured that Flanders Road is on the town’s radar.
Martel also reported a blinking light strategy, as requested for myriad intersections townwide, has been implemented during the afternoon rush in another part of Southampton Town, at the intersection of St. Andrews Road and Montauk Highway in Tuckahoe.
It’s just the second traffic control device altered to enhance traffic flow, the second green light, so to speak, given to requests targeting a variety of locations repeated for several years.
Last year, officials experimented with turning the light at the intersection of Canoe Place Road and Montauk Highway in Hampton Bays to flashing yellow in the mornings. When the summer ended and the light reverted, commuters asked officials to keep the light flashing. The practice was revived early this week.
At the time, local officials listed lights they’d like to see revised to flash yellow during peak morning commute: St. Andrews Road in Tuckahoe, County Road 39 at Tuckahoe Road in Southampton, Montauk Highway in Water Mill, and Flanders Road at both Long Neck Boulevard and Oak Avenue in Flanders.
The St. Andrews strategy has begun, but getting the others into the program may be a challenge. Montauk Highway is under Suffolk County jurisdiction, and county officials felt more study was necessary before trying the approach on County Road 39.
The state controls Flanders Road and sections of Montauk Highway. Last year Department of Transportation spokesman Stephen Canzoneri said the department reviewed the town’s request to try flashing lights at four intersections along Routes 24 and 27 and “determined that it would not be in the best interests of motorist and pedestrian safety to do so.”
