By Karl Grossman
As Long Island residents will say, should we take the ferry between the Island and New England, or drive around? The drive around, navigating the web of roads and bridges on the Island’s far west, can be quite a trip, as I learned last month, when that ferocious nor’easter hit us, causing cancellations of both the Cross Sound Ferry, between Orient Point and New London, Connecticut, and the Bridgeport & Port Jefferson Ferry.
We were taking a little vacation in southern Vermont, and suddenly needed to get back to Long Island. But the ferries weren’t running in the storm, and the choice was going around. And what a six-hour trip!
Now, I don’t mean to join the long-debated call for a bridge across the Long Island Sound. But as we sat in traffic on our way to the Bronx Whitestone Bridge, I thought about a recent renewal of the call for highways as substitutes for the ferries that cross the Sound.
A prominent Connecticut housing developer, Stephen A. Shapiro, called last month for a 14-mile bridge from western Suffolk County, at the northern terminus of Sunken Meadow State Parkway, to Interstate 95 in Bridgeport. As Shapiro told News 12 Connecticut: “It would cut down severely on travel time from Long Island to Connecticut … from three hours down to 20 minutes.”
He projected a cost of $50 billion, and said the bridge should be federally financed.
Shapiro’s “idea is catching the eyes of some lawmakers as well,” Brian Gioiele, editor of the Connecticut newspapers the Shelton Herald and the Milford Mirror, wrote. He quoted Connecticut State Rep. Joe Hoxha, who said, “A project that can bring in revenue and that will lower taxes, bring jobs and economic growth as well as protect American lives in the event of a natural disaster should be welcomed with open arms.”
A proposal for a bridge across the water — or a tunnel under it — isn’t new. In 1938, New York Sen. Royal Copeland proposed an 18-mile bridge from Orient Point to either Groton, Connecticut, or Watch Hill, Rhode Island. It never happened.
In 1964, New York public works czar Robert Moses and Gov. Nelson Rockefeller commissioned a feasibility study of a bridge from Oyster Bay to Rye, in Westchester County. There was strong opposition in both communities, and no bridge was built.
Then, in 1972, the state Department of Transportation, in cooperation with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Federal Highway Administration, considered several Sound crossings, including bridges between Syosset and Rye, Sands Point and New Rochelle, and Port Jefferson and Bridgeport. A tunnel was also studied, but deemed financially prohibitive.
In 1979, Gov. Hugh Carey commissioned another study of several crossing routes. But state planners concluded that existing ferry services were preferable, citing the high cost of the bridge proposals.
In 2008, Vincent Polimeni, of the Garden City commercial developer Polimeni International, proposed a privately financed toll tunnel between Oyster Bay and Rye, with a $25 toll each way. It had a projected cost of $10 billion, and was designed by an engineering firm that had worked on the Channel Tunnel — the Chunnel — between England and France. The proposal went nowhere.
And in 2016, Gov. Andrew Cuomo launched a feasibility study for, once more, a crossing between Oyster Bay and Rye. It was determined that an 18-mile tunnel, at a cost of $31 billion to $55 billion, was the most viable option, but it was shelved in the face of, once again, opposition in the affected communities.
So it has gone — or hasn’t gone. Public comments on Reddit about Shapiro’s newest bridge scheme are, as usual, mixed. One person posted, “It would be easier to build a Japan-South Korea tunnel. … NIMBY’s too strong on both sides.”
And another: “Despite the fact this very well could give me a job right out of college (I’m studying to be a civil engineer) I do not like this at all. I happen to like my (relatively) low-traffic area in Mount Sinai. Also, the cost, environmental impacts, NIMBY opposition, structural requirements (which compound with length and variance in the Sound bed), and traffic implications are enough of a reason for me to be opposed. I am, however, in favor of subsidizing ferry tickets and possible expansions to other north shore ports.”
In any event, beware of driving around.
Carl Grossman has been an investigative reporter in a variety of media for more than 50 years. He is a professor of journalism at the State University of New York at Old Westbury.
