The New York State Department of Transportation released a preliminary study focused on what residents call horrendous traffic on a section of Sunrise Highway in Suffolk County.
Ken Murphy, the DOT’s Long Island regional design engineer, said a section of the highway that merges near Oakdale bottlenecks, squeezing traffic from 10 lanes into six.
“You essentially have five lanes in each direction when you include the service roads. But there are no service roads at the merge area. And that is where, with approximately 130,000 vehicles a day that travel through that area, that causes some congestion.”
Murphy said the report suggests several solutions.
“The various concepts range from minor, incremental improvements to large viaduct options that would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Since the report is preliminary, the DOT is taking comments and suggestions from the public.
The final draft will not be finalized until early next year.