Newsday to host Dangerous Roads town hall on solutions

Newsday’s upcoming Dangerous Roads town hall on Wednesday evening is a chance for Long Islanders to hear from experts and share their own questions and ideas for making roadways safer.

"For the better part of the last year, we’ve been shining a light on all the problems that contribute to making our roads so dangerous," said Newsday transportation reporter Alfonso Castillo, who will moderate the panel of experts. "Now comes the hard part — figuring out how to solve them. A good start is getting knowledgeable people in a room and having a conversation about what success looks like, and what’s in its way."

The panelists are Robert Sinclair, senior manager public affairs at AAA Northeast; Mary Tanner-Richter, deputy commissioner for traffic safety at the Department of Motor Vehicles; Rob Limoges, director of safety and mobility at the state Department of Transportation; Elissa Kyle, placemaking director at Vision Long Island; and Major Christopher Casale of the New York State Troopers.

Readers can register here for the free event, which will be held at Newsday’s studios at 6 Corporate Center Dr., Melville, at 6:30 p.m. Panelists will discuss solutions ranging from better road design to laws, law enforcement, and driver education.

The event accompanies Newsday’s ongoing, yearlong investigative Dangerous Roads series.

As Newsday has reported, traffic crashes killed more than 2,100 people on Long Island over a decade — roughly the size of the village of Bellport — and seriously injured another 16,000. Crashes cost the Island an estimated $3.4 billion in a single year, paid for not just by victims and their families but also by taxpayers for things like emergency response, cleanup, crash investigations, medical care and time lost to traffic jams. Newsday has spoken with victims and loved ones about how crashes changed their lives forever.

Advocates say better traffic safety requires a holistic approach — often encapsulated by the "three E’s" of enforcement, education and engineering.

Newsday has reported on the intersections with the most crashes, the streets with the most pedestrian injuries and what makes them so dangerous. It examined the hurdles to building bicycle infrastructure in a car-dominated landscape and why Long Island spends so little on local road maintenance.

Reporters have shone a light on an alarming rise of aggressive driving as well as perverse incentives around hit-and-runs and drug test refusals, pointing to gaps in the law. An investigation found that unlicensed drivers account for a disproportionate share of fatal crashes on Long Island, while another found that police in Suffolk County issue tickets for dangerous violations at a lower rate than other areas of the state.

You can see where crashes have occurred near you by visiting Newsday’s interactive online crash map, or read all the stories in the series at newsday.com/dangerousroads. 

Newsday also has a searchable database of fatal crashes on Long Island.

The investigative series is continuing, with more solutions-focused stories still to come.

Wednesday’s event is open to Newsday subscribers and nonsubscribers alike.

"I’d encourage anybody who has been touched by traffic violence on Long Island to come be part of that conversation," Castillo said.

By Peter Gill

peter.gill@newsday.com