SOUTH FORK COMMUTER CONNECTION
...If Convenient, People Will Come
By Karl Grossman

It showed that if convenient, dependable public transportation is offered on Long Island, people will come.

The South Fork Commuter Connection, a combination of Long Island Rail Road trains and shuttle buses put into operation during construction on County Road 39 in Southampton Town was a success.

Tracey Lutz, executive director of The Retreat, a Wainscott-based shelter for battered woman, was telling on the last day of the train’s operation, June 26, how a group of Retreat employees used it and how it enabled them to not just get to work expeditiously but to “get to know each other and talk” as they commuted to work on the South Fork Commuter Connection.

Its LIRR conductors were sad to see it go: “We’re going to miss it,” said Rose Ballou noting how riders got to know each other.

Significantly, they were able to cut their traveling time, most by half.

The South Fork Commuter Connection began running in October 2007.

As The Southampton Press editorialized in June, 2008: “This marks the sad conclusion of what, by just about any measurement, could be labeled a surprising success.”
The newspaper declared that “things have certainly changed in the eight months since the train-and-shuttle option premiered, and there’s reason to believe the climate, in both a figurative and literal sense, is ripe for such a mass transportation.”

The paper noted that “the price at the pump for American motorists has risen by more than a dollar….Meanwhile, concerns about global warming, and the way carbon-based fuels hasten it, add an environmental incentive. Mass transportation is an alternative that will grow more and more attractive in the coming decade.”

State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele, Jr. of Sag Harbor said: “The feedback from commuters has been overwhelmingly positive. The establishment of the shuttle provided commuters with a viable alternative during the reconstruction of County Road 39. It also proved that South Fork residents will use mass transit to get to work if a convenient option is available.”

The South Fork Commuter Connection was launched as Suffolk County moved to end what had become a massive bottleneck for vehicles: County Road 39 from Shinnecock Hills to Southampton. The County widened the road to provide for two lanes in each direction and a turning lane in between.

The road work was done most efficiently; finished a month before schedule—in May rather than June, 2008. During its eight months of operation, the South Fork Commuter Connection made several trips daily from the Speonk Railroad Station out to Montauk and back.

With the road work completed and the South Fork Commuter Connection cancelled, its riders had to return to their cars.

But although they could move easily along the reconstructed County Road 39, when they reached two-lane State Route 27, into which County Road 39 flows, east of Southampton, many ended up stuck in traffic again. The bottleneck had been moved east and, meanwhile, the South Fork Commuter Connection was now gone.

Thiele, along with Suffolk County Legislator Jay Schneiderman and members of the South Fork Shuttle Committee, met with Long Island Rail Road President Helena Williams and Suffolk Public Works Commissioner Gil Anderson in August to consider what had happened and what might be done next.

A statement that was issued said a “consensus was reached” on these points:
• “The reconstruction of County Road 39 has significantly reduced congestion” along the stretch that it had been widened. But to the east, congestion “remains significant.”
• The South Fork Commuter Connection “was extremely popular and worked successfully as an alternative to automobile travel during the County Road 39 project.”
• The service “demonstrated mass transit is a viable option for commuting on the South Fork” and “all efforts should be made to establish a permanent shuttle system.”
Being pursued currently is a study being by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Volpe Center, funded with $360,000 in state funds, examining the transportation situation on the East End.

“I’d love to tell you that the County Road 39 improvement is going to solve all our transportation problems forever,” says Thiele. But the widened road will allow traffic to flow smoothly on it for only five years, he estimates, perhaps 10 years at the most, before population growth brings back congestion.

“Through the Volpe study,” says Thiele, “we will learn the level of service that will be required for a permanent shuttle. Mass transit,” says Thiele, “must be part of the South Fork’s future.”

Indeed, mass transit desperately needs to be part of all Long Island future—and present.

For decades, public works czar Robert Moses distorted public transportation on Long Island. Although Moses never knew how to drive a car himself, he loved the automobile. His Northern State and Southern State Parkways might be pretty roads, as far as roads go, and the Long Island Expressway—now for decades rightly called the world’s longest parking lot—might have been, in Moses’ view, an expressway for Long Island, but all this was done at the cost of mass transit.

Funds that should have been put into developing public transportation were diverted instead to Moses’ roads.
And then there is what a longtime New York State transportation chief on Long Island, Austin Saar, used to call “Saar’s Law.”

“Saar’s Law,” Saar told me as a young journalist on Long Island in 1962, was that anytime a new road was built to relieve traffic pressure on an existing highway, the new road would soon be discovered and be as congested as the older road.

The answer for this heavily-populated island can be found in places where public transportation, in a variety of forms, has been encouraged.

I’ve been impressed at the transportation system in similarly heavily-populated, land-limited Holland—the many trains and trams, buses and jitneys and corridors for bicycles and pedestrians to move along safely. It’s not too late to bring sense to public transportation on Long Island.
There are LIRR tracks all over that can do more than what they have been dedicated to over the years: serving commuters going to and from New York City. Long Island has long developed as far more than a bedroom community for the city.

Innovative transportation ideas have been advanced through the years but, unfortunately, not acted upon. Among the notions, Louis Howard, former presiding officer of the Suffolk Legislature, long called for a high-speed monorail running above the center divide of the LIE.
Now, at a time of $4-a-gallon gasoline, global warming emitting carbon dioxide a major cause of that, air pollution on Long Island and Long Islanders more than ever stuck in traffic jams, it’s high time for a shift here to public transportation.

It’s been a chicken-and-egg story. The lack of mass transit has forced people to depend, California-like, on their cars. The South Fork Commuter Commuter Connection demonstrated that Long Islanders will happily and productively use mass transit—if it is only offered.

Karl Grossman is professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, chief investigative reporter at WVVH-TV and host of the nationally-syndicated television program Enviro Close-Up.