Dangerous Roads newsletter: Path to safer Long Island roads might be in Queens

My first byline appeared in Newsday on June 10, 1999. The topic of the story: dangerous roads.

I was in the first week of my summer internship in Newsday’s Kew Gardens office and was dispatched to talk to Fresh Meadows residents after the NYPD took down an illegal drag-racing ring on Francis Lewis Boulevard. Newsday cops reporter Dan Morrison did most of the writing, but I supplied some key quotes, including from Michael Grosso, who lived a block from the strip.

“It's just annoying," Grosso told me. “Every night it goes on for a couple of hours.”

I remember the sense of resignation among many of the people I interviewed that day. It helped teach me the role that acceptance plays in perpetuating societal problems.

Fast forward 26 years, and it’s a much different picture in Queens, and all its surrounding borders, thanks in part to Vision Zero. The initiative, adopted by New York City in 2014, came with the lofty goal of eliminating all serious and fatal car crashes by 2024 through what’s commonly called the “the three ‘E’s’” of road safety: education, enforcement and engineering.

Those efforts included creating protected bike lanes throughout the city, reducing speed limits to 25 mph in much of the city -- and using automated cameras to enforce it -- and flooding the city with messaging on the importance of road safety.

Of course, 2024 came and went, and, unfortunately, serious and deadly crashes were not eradicated in New York City. But that doesn’t mean Vision Zero hasn’t proven successful. Last week, the New York City Department of Transportation announced that fatal car crashes in the city matched their lowest level in history in the first half of 2025. At 87, traffic deaths fell 26% from when Vision Zero began in 2014.

“I’d say definitely road safety in New York City, personally, to me feels like night and day compared to, say, 20 years ago,” said Julia Kite-Laidlaw, senior program manager for the Road to Zero Coalition, which helped implement the city’s plan. It's “a testament to what happens when you decide to prioritize road safety and properly fund and resource road safety.”

I met Julia last month at New York Coalition for Transportation Safety’s Walk Bike LI Summit in Mineola, where we were both panelists. She hopes Long Island will learn lessons from the successes of its neighbor to the west but acknowledges they won’t come easy.

“I know that, on Long Island, speed cameras, the mere mention of them, might be politically toxic,” said Kite-Laidlaw, who believes the key to implementing transformational road safety changes is to do so gradually until people become conditioned to them. “When you change your behavior, things that used to be unusual become second nature. It’s how you learn not to make a right turn on red when you cross into the city line. And now, you don’t even think about it.”

For all the differences between the city and Long Island, Kite-Laidlaw knows “whether you live in Queens or Nassau or Suffolk . . . what we all want to do is get home safely.”

But replicating the successes of Vision Zero on Long Island will require overcoming something else that I learned early in my Newsday career: The last thing many Long Islanders want is for their neighborhood to become more like Queens.

Readers speak up

This newsletter is all about two-way traffic, which means we want to hear your experiences, frustrations and ideas, some of which we’ll feature here. Here’s the first:

I have never been so frightened for the lives of all Long Islanders that drive on these roads. I just don’t understand what law enforcement is doing to stop these speeding drivers. I could be driving 30 minutes on the LIE and give about 20 tickets. I see people go in and out of the HOV lanes where they're not allowed, license plates you can’t read, excessive speeding, changing lanes abruptly like they are in a race, following way too close, on the phone, putting on makeup, blacked out windows. The police cars parked in the median do absolutely nothing!!!! The police cruisers should be unmarked and ON THE ROADS to see what’s going on. I hope someone steps up to the plate to make our roads safe for all the responsible people who hope they get home in one piece.

Harold & Tammy Marrero, Medford

What do you think of the job police are doing in enforcing traffic laws on Long Island? Share your experience 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.