Friday, October 30, 2026
When I was a beginning reporter on Long Island in 1963, for a story on traffic I interviewed Austin M. Sarr, district engineer for the state Department of Public Works. Sarr was quite familiar with the ever-busier highways on Long Island, and told me about what he called Sarr’s Law.
The law, he said, stated that when a highway is built to relieve traffic on another congested highway, the new road will soon be discovered — and become congested, too. The lesson, Sarr said, is that this area needs a mix of transportation options, and especially public transit — buses and trains — to move people.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the view of the state’s public works czar, Robert Moses, who was devoted to cars (although he didn’t drive one; he was chauffeured around). Moses made transportation in this region car-centric, diverting funds from public transit to construct highways. He oversaw the construction of the Southern State and Northern State parkways and the Long Island Expressway. And that’s what we’ve been left with.
Over the decades, various public officials on the Island have pushed for public transit. In his 1980 annual report, Suffolk County Executive Peter Cohalan called for “development of an efficient and reliable mass transportation system,” and that year Suffolk Transit was created and bus routes set up. The presiding officer of the Suffolk Legislature, Lou Howard, sought to have a monorail built on the center median of the LIE.
But because of Moses, autos and highways became the dominant transportation form here. And what problems that has caused. Oh, how I wished, during my 47 years as a professor at SUNY Old Westbury, that I could have traveled the 75 miles in each direction in a way other than driving. I got on the LIE in Manorville, and on every trip I encountered extreme speeding. Some drivers consider the LIE a counterpart of the Indianapolis Speedway, weaving in and out of traffic at 85 mph and faster.
In March, Alfonso Castillo, who has been covering the transportation beat at Newsday since 2008, wrote a piece in the series “Dangerous Roads” headlined, “Going fast vs. being safe is a perpetual Long Island debate.” “What made the LIE so alluring when master builder Robert Moses thought it up a century ago remains one of Long Island’s greatest curses — the promise of getting from point A to point B in a straight line as quickly as possible,” Castillo wrote. “More than 50 years after the LIE was finally finished … the expressway mentality remains, and is an impediment to efforts to rein in fast driving.” It has “cost hundreds of lives with its invitation for motorists to drive fast.”
Also in March, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed legislation requiring drivers with 16 or more speed camera violations in a year to install what’s called Intelligent Speed Limiter technology in their vehicles. As WABC-TV explained: “A device is wired into the car’s onboard computer and interfaces with GPS tracking to restrict the car’s maximum speed to the posted speed limit.”
“If you don’t install it after 45 days, you lose your registration,” Hochul said. “You should not be on the roads if you don’t care whether or not you’re going to kill somebody.”
On. Sept. 22, the 14th annual Car Free Day, Castillo used public transit to go back and forth from his home in Valley Stream to Newsday’s office in Melville. He used the LIRR, and had to take a circuitous route.
“The trip — which on an average day takes about 40 minutes to an hour each way by car — took two hours and 10 minutes on my way to work,” Castillo wrote, “and about two hours and 45 minutes on the way back.”
Suffolk County Executive Ed Romaine, in his State of the County presentation on Sept. 4, spoke of the “clogged” highways and lack of LIRR double tracks. “We need convenient transportation that’s available to link our trains and our buses,” Romaine said. “We need electrification, we need double rail, we need the investment that should have been made. This [transportation strategy] should not be car-centric.”
Karl 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.
