Dangerous Roads newsletter: Sunrise Highway the real peril of first jobs

Back in the 1990s, at the age of 16, I held three part-time jobs at Green Acres Mall. I was a fast-food cashier, a shoe store stock boy, and a video store sales clerk. Granted, I wasn't exactly cleaning the windows on a Manhattan skyscraper, but the jobs involved working near oil fryers, handling razor-sharp box cutters and lugging around heavy boxes filled with VHS tapes.

In all three jobs, the most dangerous part of my workday remained the same: crossing Sunrise Highway.

Not yet old enough to drive, getting to the Valley Stream mall about a mile away from my childhood home in Rosedale, Queens, typically entailed walking or riding my bike, and, at some point, crossing the perilous six-lane highway, where cars and trucks are known to roar by at upwards of 50 mph. I somehow managed to stay safe.

Fast forward 30-something years, and another 16-year-old  Alfonso Castillo — or AJ, as my eldest son is better known — is looking for his first part-time job, also at Green Acres. And, just as my parents surely did, now it’s my turn to fret about the prospect of my kid crossing Sunrise Highway.

Not helping me feel any better about that: Newsday’s Dangerous Roads project, in which Sunrise Highway, also known as State Route 27, comes up again and again.

In our series' first installment, Peter Gill and Arielle Martinez told the story of 15-year-old Amir Porterfield, who was fatally struck by an SUV at a Sunrise Highway intersection in Copiague where two other pedestrians were killed within the previous 11 months. As the story noted, along that half-mile stretch of Sunrise Highway over the past decade, crashes killed nine people.

Sunrise Highway was also well represented in our story looking at Long Island’s most dangerous intersections. The intersection with the most serious or fatal crashes over the last 10 years: Straight Path and Sunrise Highway in Lindenhurst.

And Sunrise ranked high in Newsday data journalist Karthika Namboothiri’s list of Long Island roads with the most crashes. As she noted, "Since 2012, 83 people have died on Sunrise Highway in crashes and 459 seriously injured." Although a few other roads had higher numbers, Sunrise was particularly dangerous when accounting for traffic and length.

And Sunrise Highway has been front and center of Newsday’s coverage about Long Island’s dangerous roads well before we launched this project. In 2022, Newsday reported that Route 27 was the site of 61 fatal crashes between 2016 and 2020 — more than any other road on Long Island except Route 25, which had one more.

In that story, Newsday reporter Lorena Mongelli offered some insight as to why Sunrise was especially problematic, describing how it weaves "through commercial and industrial areas, downtowns and even more sprawling zones with varying speed limits and design features that can make driving, walking and biking dangerous."

While the problem is easy enough to diagnose, a solution has proved elusive. Recently, Rep. Laura Gillen (D-Rockville Centre) brought up the idea of installing traffic circles or roundabouts at particularly dangerous intersections on Sunrise Highway. The suggestion was quickly scoffed at by some Long Island drivers, including a few who emailed me.

Continuing to accept that Sunrise Highway is just inherently dangerous doesn’t seem like much of a plan, especially when it’s your kid in the crosswalk.

Readers speak up

A couple weeks ago I wrote about how engineering and design improvements could make crosswalks safer for pedestrians, including those with disabilities. This week’s email adds to that conversation.

There are a plethora of crosswalks across Deer Park Ave in Babylon Village, but they are not well-designed. With cars parked all around them, it can be very hard to see someone entering the crosswalk, especially south of the LIRR and at night. Babylon Village needs flashing warning lights like those installed when Wellwood Avenue in Lindenhurst was rebuilt recently.

Don Weimer, Babylon

What ideas do you have to make it safer to cross the street in your community? Share them with us at roads@newsday.com.

By Alfonso A. Castillo

alfonso.castillo@newsday.com@alfonsoreports

Alfonso Castillo has been reporting for Newsday since 1999 and covering the transportation beat since 2008. He grew up in the Bronx and Queens and now lives in Valley Stream with his wife and two sons.