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Op-Ed: The Time Has Come to Complete the Nassau Expressway
- dOp The Time Has Come to Complete the Nassau Expressway
By Leg. Howard Kopel and Leg. Denise Ford
We applaud when new businesses open in our community, providing jobs, much needed tax revenue and convenience to our residents. However, while working to attract these companies, we cannot neglect to ask whether we can support the additional burdens placed on our infrastructure.
The new Amazon warehouse now rising on Rockaway Boulevard on the Nassau-Queens border will, when operational, add a significant amount of new traffic to an already immensely overburdened roadway, which serves as the only real evacuation route from the Five Towns, Far Rockaway, and the Long Beach-Atlantic Beach area, housing many tens of thousands of people. Already now, Rockaway carries many multiples of the amount of traffic for which it was designed many years ago. Several times a day, on most days, traffic is backed up in both directions, usually causing severe delays to motorists. We have seen southbound traffic backed up all the way to the Southern State Parkway, a distance of about 7 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.
To be perfectly clear, this is NOT a call for Amazon’s warehouse plan to be blocked. Rather, we should welcome and support it properly. And the solution is readily available, requiring only the attention and action by our state and federal officials who have ignored this critical situation for years, endangering the lives and welfare of the affected areas.
The answer to this critical problem is to get traffic traveling between the affected areas and Queens and Manhattan off the commercial strip running from Burnside Avenue on the
south end, to Brookville Boulevard on the north. It would also be good to bypass the area in Queens where the Motor Vehicle Bureau is situated. The issue was known, and a solution envisioned before most of us were born. A highway (the “Nassau Expressway,” now New York Route 878) connecting the Belt Parkway and running through the Atlantic Beach Bridge was planned as early as 1945. It will not be necessary to recite the complete unhappy series of delays and government (mostly New York State) failures affecting the proposed
highway. This is well documented and available online. Suffice it to say that, although the complete right of way was acquired by New York State in the 1950s and 1960s, only the Western section in Queens, ending at JFK Airport and a scaled down southern section, in Nassau were ever built, leaving the entire portion alongside the airport and along the busy commercial area between Brookville Boulevard in Queens and Peninsula Boulevard in Nassau County unbuilt. This unbuilt section accounts for the traffic issues.
We have been calling for years for New York State to complete the Nassau Expressway. Instead, Governor Cuomo and Senator Kaminsky provided a band-aid that never helped. They rebuilt a half-mile section of the existing roadway between Burnside Avenue in Lawrence and Rockaway at the astonishing cost of $100 million. While this did alleviate flooding that happened a few times a year, it did nothing to fix the real problem.
We wrote to Senators Schumer and Gillibrand, as well as Congressional Representatives Rice and Meeks on April 6, 2021, recognizing the likely imminence of a large infrastructure program, and asking that this community be remembered and the Nassau Expressway finally built. To date, we have not had the courtesy of a reply.
It is time for our community to stand up and declare that we are not second-class citizens and deserve to finally have our needs recognized and addressed by our elected representatives. If you agree, please join us, and sign our online petition at: www.nassaucountyny.gov/ld7 v
Leg. Howard J. Kopel is the Deputy Presiding Officer of the Nassau County Legislature representing the 7th Legislative District. Leg. Denise Ford is the Alternate Deputy Presiding Officer of the Nassau County Legislature, representing the 4th Legislative District.
