Streetlights on Sunrise at Carol Drive will work soon

For more than a year, pedestrians at the Massapequa Park train station have been crossing the street in the dark.

Phyllis Lawless told us she had made several calls about a series of nonworking streetlights at Sunrise Highway and Carol Drive, but has seen no results.

"I get the runaround," she said. "LIPA, the village, the town . . . They just installed new handicap ramps and there's a crosswalk with buttons for pedestrians to push." Still, the overhead lights remained dark.

Lawless contacted us in the fall as Daylight Saving Time was coming to an end and many more homeward-bound commuters would be crossing the street in darkness. Without streetlights, she said, it was difficult to decipher pedestrians in dark suits and coats.

There's a reason she was getting the runaround: Although the village maintains streetlights, it couldn't fix them until wiring was repaired. "During Sandy the wires that run across Sunrise came down," Village Administrator Peggy Caltabiano said. "That's why those [streetlights] are not working. We can't put the lights on until LIPA corrects the problem."

By the time we caught up with the streetlights, the Long Island Power Authority had been replaced by PSEG Long Island. We contacted the utility early this month and learned last week that repairs had just been made: A new section of wiring was run from the south side of Sunrise Highway to the site of the lights close to the northeast corner, spokeswoman Elizabeth Flagler said.

Caltabiano said the village's work on the lights themselves is expected to begin Monday, when a project gets underway to replace the lamps in all streetlights in the village with light-emitting diodes. The streetlights on Sunrise at Carol Drive will be first on the list, she said.

The village has about 1,200 streetlights, public works Superintendent Robert Macri said, and the shift to LEDs is expected to use about half as much as energy. The village's 30 streetlights on Sunrise will get 168-watt LEDs to replace 215-watt bulbs; lights on other village streets will use bulbs of about 53 watts, Macri said, less than a third of the 175-watt average of the bulbs now in use.

We tried to find the entrance to eastbound Route 27/Sunrise Highway, the one from northbound Little East Neck Road in West Babylon. We couldn't.

There is one, we were told, but drivers unfamiliar with that route would probably drive right past it.

Bob Puglielli of Babylon alerted us to the hidden entrance.

"There should be a Route 27-East sign at the corner of Little East Neck Road and Roland Place," Puglielli wrote in a letter. "As you approach that corner, there is no sign letting you know that you should turn right in order to get onto Sunrise Highway headed east."

Which seemed odd, given that a sign to that entrance was posted for drivers in the southbound lanes: It directs them to turn onto Roland Place, a residential street, where a sign a block later signals a left turn to Sunrise Highway.

We asked the state Department of Transportation why there was no sign and received this response:

"Our NYSDOT Maintenance Crews visited the area and discovered this guide sign for NY Route 27/Sunrise Highway was in fact missing," department spokeswoman Eileen Peters said in an email. "They reinstalled a new one immediately."

Puglielli had become aware of the need for a sign on his daily mail delivery route and concluded that drivers new to the area would never guess that getting to Sunrise Highway would require turning onto an unmarked residential street. Adding to the confusion is the presence, a short distance later, of a sign to the entrance for westbound Sunrise.

The new sign will "make a lot of people not familiar with this road . . . make their lives a lot easier," Puglielli said. "They won't have to wonder where the entrance is, and won't have to turn the car around" to try again.