Don't Scuttle The Shuttle

The recently released transportation update to the Town Comprehensive Plan confirms what everyone in town suspected: The volume of summer traffic on the Montauk Highway has tripled in the past 15 years. On some back roads, the study found, there are four times as many cars and trucks trying to circumnavigate the congestion as there were 30 years ago.

The town must look to other means of weekend travel, especially buses and trains, if it is to manage the "overwhelming demands" on its roadways, the report concludes. Indeed, there seems to be little alternative. It is too late now, after decades of opposition and the loss of hundreds of acres to development, to build a new highway as a bypass of the village centers.

Some of the study's specific recommendations, still in draft form, involve long-term objectives that will require separate studies of their own. At least one of them, however, perhaps the most significant - municipal bus service - could be implemented on a small experimental scale almost immediately.

Indeed, the town had the wheels in motion for a pilot-project bus to be rolling by the July Fourth weekend, shuttling riders from the Town Hall parking lot (virtually empty on weekends) to Amagansett's protected ocean beaches as well as to shop in East Hampton Village. (East Hampton High School's lot, largely empty all summer, would make another good pick-up point, especially for Northwest and Sag Harbor residents, if this idea ever comes to fruition.)

Protests from the Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee, which objected to buses lumbering along Indian Wells Highway and Atlantic Avenue as well as to increased crowds at the beaches, helped shoot down the proposal. And the East Hampton Village Board's reluctance to have village beaches included in the plan did not help.

In the end, the Town Board scuttled the shuttle. That is a shame. If we cannot agree on a trial run for even a single small bus, holding no more than 25 people and making a loop once every 50 minutes, how will we ever know whether there is enough demand to make alternative transportation work?

This project should get a second look before it is abandoned entirely. It was intelligently focused, and too well-thought-out to be discarded so easily. On rainy days, for example, the bus would have skipped the beaches and run only between the parking lot and East Hampton Village, where riders could shop as long as they wanted without worrying about parking spaces or two-hour time limits.

Based on a scale from A to F, the transportation study predicts that the Wainscott portion of Montauk Highway will warrant an F by 2002 if automobile traffic increases just 5 percent a year between now and then. It will take Amagansett a little longer, until 2004. For F, read G - gridlock.

East Hampton sometimes has been a model for other towns on environmental legislation. There is no reason why it cannot take the lead once again in finding a solution to the traffic dilemma.

Everybody hates congestion - but everybody seems to hate change just as much. Which do we hate less? The clock is ticking.