Dangerous Roads newsletter: Does Long Island spend enough to safely maintain its streets?

I'm Newsday transportation reporter Peter Gill, filling in for Alfonso. Last week, my colleague Arielle Martinez and I took a detour from the usual road safety topics to look at local street funding on Long Island.

I say a "detour," although there is some connection between the two. Spending on upkeep, repairs and improvements, when lacking, can lead to safety issues like potholes.

We chose this topic because of a paradox: Long Island, despite being a wealthy region with high taxes, has the eighth-worst local road conditions of 11 regions in the state.

Digging into it, we found that Long Island spends less than any other region on road maintenance, repair and improvements relative to traffic volume, and just about the least relative to population. A lot of that has to do with how local governments choose to spend their own property and other tax revenues, but state aid also plays a role. Long Island and other suburban parts of the state (which are often, but not always, wealthier) get the least aid. You can read our full story here.

There’s also a related argument that we didn’t get into in the story: states nationwide don’t share enough state and federal gas tax revenues with local governments. A recent research paper found that in New York, roughly 42% of all vehicle travel takes place on locally owned roads, but the state shared only about 12.5% of its road budget with local governments in 2022. Given that so much gas is burned on local roads, authors Adie Tomer and Ben Swedberg of the Brookings Institution argue that more gas tax revenue should go to local governments — which could improve local road conditions.

"New York has a pretty sizable gap between how much people are driving on these local roads and how much the state is spending on them," Swedberg told me.

In response, the state DOT told us that it has increased local aid in recent years, pointing out that the current five-year plan, which ends in 2027, has roughly $6.6 billion for local roads, a little more than double the previous plan, which ended in 2020.

Later last week, I reported on a major funding decision affecting the state-owned Sunrise Highway, Meadowbrook Parkway and Southern State Parkway.

At the headquarters of the New York Metropolitan Planning Council, near the very tip of downtown Manhattan, an important vote took place regarding federal and state road funding. The council, made up of representatives from suburban counties, the city and state transportation agencies, voted on its five-year plan, which lists the highway and transit projects to prioritize for federal funding. If a project isn’t listed, it essentially has no chance of becoming reality.

Suffolk County Executive Edward P. Romaine had threatened last month to veto the 2026-2030 plan unless more projects for Long Island were included. This was unusual. Council staff told me there hadn’t been a "no" vote on a five-year plan since at least the 1990s, if not longer. But Romaine’s strategy seemed to pay off, as two Long Island projects — including $395 million for rebuilding the Oakdale merge and $250 million for improvements on the Meadowbrook-Southern State Parkway interchange — were added to the list just days before the vote. About 12% of federal funding and about 26% of state funds in the plan, which passed unanimously, are for Long Island, according to the council. Read the story here.

Readers sound off

From a reader in Rockville Centre:

"Your informational journalism article on the analysis and title on High Wealth, Bad Road lacked a key ingredient on how to solve this issue with a "fix." The "fix" being, discontinuance of asphalt roads to concrete roads, that provide many lifetimes of utility, in comparison to asphalt.

A hundred years from now our ancestors will remark. "How stupid and wasteful to make asphalt roads out of oil when concrete roads last for centuries"

Have a suggestion on how to build smarter, better or otherwise fix our road situation? Share them with us at roads@newsday.com.