Amazon warehouse could add to Five Towns roadway congestion

Leaving the Five Towns Shopping Center from the west exit on a recent Friday morning required waiting through two traffic signal cycles and cutting off a pickup truck to avoid being hit by vehicles headed to Queens, as traffic on the south side of Rockaway Boulevard, on its way to the Five Towns, obstructed the intersection.

The heavily traveled Rockaway Boulevard-Rockaway Turnpike corridor on the Nassau-Queens border is part of State Route 878, also known as the Nassau Expressway, which stretches 10 miles from Ozone Park, Queens, to the Atlantic Beach Bridge, in Lawrence.

The expressway is an evacuation route for 40,000 residents and a critical roadway for more than 56,000 vehicles on weekdays.

In December, at the height of the holiday season, a new resident business will no doubt add more vehicles: A 422,000-square-foot Amazon warehouse is expected to open just west of the shopping center.

Trucks may be arriving and departing throughout the day at the warehouse, roughly a mile from Kennedy Airport and referred to as a “last-mile delivery facility,” by Amazon officials, who explain that these sites are the last link in the chain of the delivery process from order to customer.

“It’s going to be a nightmare,” said longtime Woodmere resident Joan Greenfield, adding that she felt “enraged frustration” that such a warehouse would be operating in an area that already has a shopping center and too much traffic.

Cary Brozik, also of Woodmere, is not happy either. “I am very familiar with the location of that warehouse and am puzzled as to how their vehicles will enter and leave,” Brozik wrote in an email. “That intersection can at times be highly trafficked and congested. More trucks coming and going will only add to the congestion.”

For several years, local elected officials have worked to mitigate the often nightmarish congestion by advocating for traffic signal synchronization to help vehicular flow. Synced stoplights were part of a $130 million state Department of Transportation project, completed in December 2019, that overhauled a .57-mile section of the expressway.

“It’s like a Band-Aid on a hemorrhage,” said County Legislator Howard Kopel, a Republican who represents the area. Kopel has been stumping for several years for the state to build a bypass to move vehicles traveling to Queens and other points west from the commercial area to reduce traffic volume.

Two weeks ago, Kopel and fellow Republican Legislator Denise Ford detailed their thinking in an op-ed published in the Herald.

“Rockaway Boulevard already carries many multiples of the volume of traffic it was designed for many years ago,” the legislators wrote. “Several times a day most days, traffic is backed up in both directions, usually causing severe delays for motorists. We have seen southbound traffic backed up all the way to the Southern State Parkway, a distance of about seven miles. Northbound, we have seen a good part of the Five Towns area snarled in traffic for hours. Ambulances, police and other first responders face a hopeless task when they need to traverse the area. Emergency evacuation, should it be needed, is virtually impossible.”

Ford and Kopel predicted that the Amazon warehouse would “add a significant amount of new traffic to an already immensely overburdened roadway” — but, they added, the new facility should be supported, and federal and state officials should consider the bypass as a viable solution.

The DOT, meanwhile, is keeping its eye on the traffic lights. “The NYS Department of Transportation continues to monitor and adjust traffic signal timing for optimal travel conditions along the Rockaway Turnpike/Rockaway Boulevard and Nassau Expressway corridors,” DOT spokesman Stephen Canzoneri wrote in an email, “in coordination with the Nassau County Department of Public Works and the NYC Department of Transportation.”

On the south side of Rockaway Boulevard, diagonally opposite the site of the Amazon warehouse, Terrence Holland, the store manager of FCS Sneakers, said he hoped something would be done about the crowded road. “The traffic is more of a headache,” he said. “There are a lot of accidents at it is. With more trucks, more cars, I can see more of a negative impact.”

Have an opinion on traffic on the Rockaway Boulevard-Rockaway Turnpike corridor? Send a letter to jbessen@liherald.com.