Last week, Newsday published two separate articles about local elected officials in both Nassau and Suffolk Counties calling for safety improvements on fatal roads.

In response to two fatal crashes in the last three months along a stretch of Roslyn Road in the Town of North Hempstead, Nassau County Legislator Judy Jacobs is calling for a uniform speed limit of 30 miles per hour. Roslyn Road currently has speed limits that range from 30 to 40 miles per hour throughout the nearly 2 mile corridorfrom 25B to the Long Island Expressway.

In Suffolk County, the Mayor of the Village of Lindenhurst Thomas Brennan expressed his frustrations with the New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) for not acting quickly enough to address safety issues on Montauk Highway. Seven pedestrian fatalities occurred along the corridor between 2010 and 2012, making Montauk Highway the fourth most deadly road for pedestrians in Suffolk County. The most recent call for safety improvements comes after a 10 year-old boy was critically injured in a crosswalk while crossing the road with his mother earlier this month. Just a year prior, one block away, a teenage girl was killed by a drunk driver.

Lindenhurst officials say they have been appealing to NYSDOT for more safety measures along a section of Montauk Highway for more than a decade, and in March the mayor wrote again to ask for a ‘road diet’, calling on NYSDOT to remove two of the five lanes that run through Lindenhurst. Unfortunately, previous studies by NYSDOT found that the roadway did not meet “nationally accepted engineering criteria” for safety improvements, leaving local officials feeling anything but optimistic at the outcome of this study. One village official said, “We’ve had nobody come down and sit with us and go over our concerns. If they’re just doing counts and statistics, that’s not enough.”

NYSDOT needs to revisit what type of “criteria” they are adhering to. An endorsement of the NACTO guidelines would give communities more confidence that NYSDOT is examining new approaches to these safety issues, as would sitting down to discuss how to make roads safer for all users, not only in these communities but in all communities demanding safety throughout Long Island.