Planned bicycle, pedestrian paths to link Great River LIRR station to three state parks

A plan projected to cost almost $2 million in total aims to make accessing over 6,000 acres of Long Island parkland easier and safer.

Parks & Trails New York released a plan to include safe bicycle and pedestrian pathways on some busy routes that connect to public land. The project would link the Great River Long Island Rail Road station to Bayard Cutting Arboretum, Connetquot River State Park Preserve and Heckscher State Park.

“We saw this as a tremendous opportunity to enable safe access for people from the station, bike access in particular, and also hopefully providing a model that could be applied elsewhere on Long Island and elsewhere in New York State,” Paul White, executive director of PTNY, a nonprofit organization, said in an interview. “Increasing numbers of New Yorkers want access to nature, but often don’t have the means to get there.”

Funding for the project has not been secured, but White said he expected it would come from a variety of local, state and federal sources. The project will take one to two years to complete, he said. 

The Great River train station on the LIRR’s Montauk Branch serves roughly 48,000 passengers each year and is the target for many of the plan’s improvements. Currently, there are limited options for bike riders, as there is one bike rack at the station that can only accommodate between 8 to 10 bikes. In addition to more bike racks, new signs and pavement decals would be installed to guide LIRR passengers to the new pathways.

“These improvements will be used by people that take the rail, but will also be used by people in the communities surrounding these areas,” Thomas Isles said. Isles is a board member of the Long Island Greenbelt Trail Conference, a nonprofit group maintaining over 200 miles of hiking paths. “This will provide safe movement for kids on bikes, for pedestrians walking as well as improved access and awareness of the Greenbelt trail.”

Experts consider many of the nearby roads to the LIRR station dangerous for bikers and pedestrians, with the 0.5-mile stretch of Connetquot Avenue in particular having a high traffic volume in addition to 55 crashes between 2021 and 2024.

“The very nature of the design [of Long Island roads] does not lend itself to safe biking infrastructure,” Daniel Flanzig, board president of the New York Bikers Coalition, said. “We have the ability to change that.”

PTNY hopes to use the Long Island plan as a model on how to build a more connected greenway network statewide.

“No matter if you are interested in the romantic access to nature or just the hard economics, we see this as a time when people are waking up to how important these places are and how lucky we are in New York State to have this amazing array of state parks,” White said.