New Hyde Park Mayor Lawrence Montreuil said last Thursday that the company building the LIRR’s third track project has made changes to address traffic concerns in the village, including mapping planned closures to ensure they do not overlap.
“Before tonight, I was down meeting with the project executives of both the 3TC and the MTA and talking about the whole configuration – what it’s doing to us in terms of traffic and how that traffic is controlled or mitigated once the New Hyde Park road work starts,” Montreuil said at a village board meeting. ‘They’re taking a much harder look at the traffic flow and the traffic redirection.”
On traffic, Montreuil said “we all noticed a major traffic issue” on Sept. 27 after a 3TC engineer closed Tanners Pond Road in Garden City which was not scheduled to be closed. This closure resulted in “catastrophic results” in the village, he said.
“What we expressed to the MTA and 3TC was that there doesn’t seem to be anybody with a bird’s eye view looking at all these different aspects of these different things going on at the same time,” Montreuil said.
Montreuil said he and village officials asked MTA and 3TC officials to make sure teams at work sites such as New Hyde Park Road, Denton Avenue and Merillon Avenue are actively communicating.
He said that 3TC officials said they have set up a map on a board in their office showing all local roads and their closures to ensure these “catastrophic results” do not occur again.
“They have a protocol established. They’ll close no road without 72 hours of notice,” Montreuil said. “They have all these different planned road closures on the board for everybody to see when they’re going to happen, where they’re going to happen so they can see if there’s going to be any potential conflict.”
Montreuil said he had received a complaint about the street lights placed at Covert Avenue, which is set to fully reopen Oct. 12. Montreuil said the complaint said the lights aren’t “nice” or “attractive.”
The LIRR expansion project will add a third track on the Main Line from Floral Park to Hicksville and is being carried out by 3rd Track Constructors. The project began in January 2018 and is to be completed by late 2022. Its development areas include Carle Place, Floral Park, Garden City, Garden City Park, Hicksville, Mineola, New Cassel, New Hyde Park and Westbury.
