Letters

It was H.L. Mencken who famously quipped: “For every complex problem there is a solution which is clear, simple and wrong.”

Perhaps Bill Hillman’s recent trip down memory lane surrounding the “lost opportunity” of a Sunrise Highway extension as our “simple solution” of today’s traffic nightmare [“Traffic Solutions Face a Daunting Opponent on South Fork: Residents,” 27east.com, August 14] would prompt your editors to release a 50-year anniversary recap of this grandiose plan? After all, the clear evidence of mitigating congestion through highway construction is readily on display in the traffic-free nirvanas of Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta, and even our neighboring Nassau County.

Today, most policy experts identify the cause of our current traffic debacle as lack of affordable housing east of the canal, coupled with poor viable transportation alternatives, and sprinkled with a healthy dose of bad zoning and over-development.

I was a proud participant in the “Halt the Highway” movement of the 1970s, attending rallies, signing petitions and making preparations to lay down in front of the bulldozers, if need be. Traveling the fields and forests of northern Water Mill and Bridgehampton, I couldn’t imagine the devastation a four-lane highway and cloverleaf interchanges would bring to what The Nature Conservancy identified as one of the “great places” in our nation. Perhaps county policy of traffic alleviation was to destroy the area so no one would want to travel there. I certainly wouldn’t put it past them.

Fortunately, the diligent efforts of the local citizenry prevailed, and the Sunrise Highway extension — along with the Jamesport Nuclear Power Plant — were relegated to the garbage heap of bad ideas brought forth under the guise of “simple solutions.”

Dennis Finnerty

Hampton Bays

Finnerty has been a member of the Southampton Town Planning Board since 1992, serving as its chairman from 2000 to 2021, and is currently its vice chairman — Ed.