Long Island's dangerous roads, and how to make them safer, focus of Newsday town hall

Aggressive drivers cutting one another off and passing at dangerously high speeds — it's an unwanted stressor "every day" for Patricia Crafton as she commutes to work on the Southern State Parkway from her home in West Babylon.

Crafton, among about 100 people who attended Newsday’s Dangerous Roads town hall at its Melville studio Wednesday evening, replied, "not often," when asked by a Newsday reporter about the frequency of such drivers on the parkway getting pulled over by the police.

"I want to know, what is the plan?" Crafton, 66, said. "Is there a plan to do something about this?"

The town hall, hosted by Newsday transportation reporter Alfonso A. Castillo and billed as an effort aimed at "Finding Solutions," included a panel of transportation experts focused on safety, education and cutting through the bureaucracy that can often stand in the way of making roads safer.

One fix would be strengthening state law as it pertains to drugged drivers, said panelist Mary Tanner-Richter, deputy commissioner for traffic safety and investigations at the state Department of Motor Vehicles.

Under the current law, "unless someone is involved in a serious personal injury crash or a fatal, they can refuse to give you blood, breath, urine, saliva," Tanner-Richter said. "If you refuse that, there is nothing law enforcement can do ... to make you tell us what’s in your blood."

Other panelists included Maj. Christopher Casale, of the New York State Police, Rob Limoges, director of the Office of Traffic Safety and Mobility at the state Transportation Department, Elissa Kyle, placemaking director at Vision Long Island and AAA Northeast senior manager of public affairs Robert Sinclair Jr.

Limoges said engineering solutions, even reducing the width of a roadway by only a foot, could make drivers slow down. Technology, such as speed cameras, could also alter behavior, panelists said. Although, Castillo noted, for everyone who would support automated enforcement, "you may have 10 times as many crying ‘foul’ ... if they got hit with one of these" tickets. 

Kyle said speed cameras and similar technology "does take the subjectivity out" of enforcement, however, she added: "When things are enforced primarily by fine, then it hits people of different income levels differently."

Iesha Kyles sat in the front row at the town hall with her family as the panelists and Castillo discussed the challenges of making Long Island roadways safer for motorists and pedestrians. A Newsday investigation found that traffic crashes killed more than 2,100 people between 2014 and 2023 and seriously injured more than 16,000 people.

Kyles got up to speak about the death of her 15-year-old son Amir, who died in 2023 after two vehicles struck him in a crosswalk on Sunrise Highway in Copiague as he walked home from a volleyball game.

Amir losing his life was "the worst thing that has ever happened to me," she said.

According to the Suffolk police, Amir entered the crosswalk without waiting for the pedestrian signal, Newsday previously reported.

Kyles told the town hall she wished she had taught Amir how to safely cross a street.

Educating children and families about pedestrian safety will hopefully spare another mother such a loss, she said.

"I don’t think we ever told our kids how to cross the street ... to make eye contact with the drivers," Kyles said, audibly choked up while addressing the crowd.

"I’ve just been bringing awareness to people in general especially children on how to cross the road."