By:Jeff Lipton
Residents who live along Peninsula Boulevard and drivers are irate over a road project that has closed one lane of traffic in each direction, making the commute a nightmare for them.
We understand that they have to make repairs to the road, but it has been done over and over and over again the last two or three years,said Howard Kupferberg of Barnard Avenue in Woodmere. They are paving the same areas for the fifth or sixth time.
Many stretches along Peninsula Boulevard in the Five Towns are being repaved, making a five or 10-minute drive a half-hour or longer, motorists said.
Nassau County has jurisdiction over Peninsula Boulevard and the road work that has been ongoing. The project, which is being done to upgrade the roadway by resurfacing it, began on Aug. 15 and is slated for completion on May 11, 2002. The project extends from the Five Towns through Lynbrook.
Motorists have voiced complaints that driving from work in Lawrence to pick up their children at the Woodmere Middle School takes at least a half-hour with the construction causing major traffic jams.
The drive is crazy,said one mother of a Woodmere Middle School student. What are they doing to the streets now? We shouldn't have to wait that long. It's really terrible. It's awful.
Another motorist said it took her a half hour driving from Hewlett to Lawrence. I can't believe what usually takes me five minutes took me 30 minutes this time,she said.
Kupferberg said something seems wrong when the road is broken up so many times and repaved again. It seems like someone is getting rich on that,he said. The traffic jams are absurd. They have been shutting down one lane on each side and they have been going back and forth on that.
It appears to me that work has been going on for the last couple of years,said Kupferberg, a resident of Woodmere for 22 years, who operates a real estate company, also in Woodmere. I don't think people know what's going on. I don't pretend to be an engineer. I'm a taxpayer. I want to know what the deal is.
He said Peninsula Boulevard had been grooved
