The Hamptons are famous for magnificent estates, spectacular beaches, lavish parties and, of course, horrendous traffic.
But fear not: Southampton Town police are on the job. Seriously.
To address bottlenecks in Hampton Bays, local officials sent not traffic experts but cops to assess some problematic intersections, the Southampton Press reported.
Police Chief Steven Skrynecki has been asked to get permission from the state and Suffolk County to change six stop lights to blinking yellows for two hours during the morning rush, known locally as the “trade parade.”
Montauk Highway, which slows to a crawl because it’s one of the few east-west roads on the peninsula that goes anywhere, is the target.
The town is also considering converting an intersection on the other side of the Shinnecock Canal into a roundabout, which have been shown to significantly reduce travel time and fatality rates. However, localities in America — with the odd exception of Carmel, Indiana — have been slow to introduce them because of inertia, ignorance, fear of change or unwillingness to do anything that works in Europe.
So, perhaps Southampton Town is onto something, despite entrusting the task to professionals trained to deal with miscreants, not Maseratis.
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But the blinking-light test will come first. A five-day trial will run from Aug. 16 to 20.
Police are concerned that the yellow lights may render hazardous a U-turn commonly employed by commuters who plow through residential side roads in Hampton Bays to Montauk Highway via Newtown Lane. So that turn, along with another left, will be banned during the trial, forcing those drivers into another diversion, according to the Southampton Press.
Motorists employ that route to avoid congestion on another infamously slow road, Sunrise Highway. A problem for another day.
[Southampton Press] — Erik Engquist