25 is the New 58

You'd figure that it would happen sooner or later.

With all the activity in downtown Riverhead, it seems that Main Street and Route 58 have flipped flopped traffic trends since Route 58 was widened a year ago, making Main Street "The New 58."

For the last number of years, knowing how much traffic there would be, I would never drive on Route 58 and avoid it at all costs.

Nowadays, I barely hit the brakes while driving on 58, it's much more efficient and easy to get to the west side of town, then back east.

Main Street, however, is a totally different story today, and only figures to get worse over time. Once the better route to go east and west in town than to hit the crossroads to head north, it has now become a dead standstill since the Hyatt hotel has opened.

It seems like it takes more than 10 minutes to get to the west side of town from Town Hall which is less than a half mile past Roanoke, and now with the much needed construction on West Main Street, even longer.  Cruising along this constuction zone makes me feel like I am driving down downtown Fallujah.

Just the last couple of days during lunch hour, traffic is backed up bumper to bumper fully along Peconic Avenue from Main Street, through the circle and down about 20-30 cars deep on Route 24 heading north.  Roanoke Avenue routinely backs up 20-30 cars past the Second Street traffic light, and now Ostrander gets jammed up 10-15 cars deep for those heading south onto Main Street in yielding to a constant stream of pedestrians and traffic.

And, this is for a Main Street that is almost entirely vacant between McCabes and Riverhead Grill on the south side of the road as well as on the north side of the road, which begs the question:

What happens if/when those other storefronts do become occupied?

The long evasive "dream" of a hustle and bustle of downtown Riverhead will simultaneously become a resident's nightmare when it comes to getting east and west, even to go a mile or two.

Given the daily snags along the Main Street/Roanoke Avenue corridor, I'd think that our EMTs, ambulance drivers, police force and fire squads that regularly transport medical emergencies from the south up Roanoke to Peconic Bay Medical Center have to be significantly challenged to properly do their jobs.

I'd hope that our NY State DOT have their engineers looking at this and possibly collaborating with the town on reviewing traffic patterns, ingress and egress, and working towards a solution.

For example, possibly building a pedestrian tunnel for people to get to the Hyatt/Atlantis Aquarium from the north side of the road at the corner of Ostrander. Even though this may be costly to the State and Town, this would certainly alleviate the constant street-level flow of pedestrians in and out of the facilities and parking lots during the day.

It doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility, given that I've seen much larger tunnels built specifically for pedestrians in major cities around the world (like the one adjoining London's Marble Arch and Hyde Park).

So, while our engineers and planners try to find a way to fix this mess, I'll get my walking shoes out while the weather is still nice.

Or maybe even a mountain bike to zip back and forth.