A Roundabout? Why?

A plan by the Village of East Hampton and New York State to spend $1.4 million on traffic changes at the intersection of Route 114 and Toilsome Lane is puzzling, but even more puzzling are the reasons behind it. A call to the engineer who came up with the series of roadway “islands” and a roundabout referred our request for an explanation to a village official, who was only able to produce a few words of meaningless boilerplate.

In terms of injuries and vehicular damage, there are any number of village crossroads that are far more dangerous, including Main Street and Buell Lane and Route 114 and Stephen Hand’s Path. Moreover, the drawings for the roundabout appear to do little to accommodate bicyclists on a popular route between Sag Harbor and East Hampton.

If the village cannot clearly explain what problems the roundabout and associated improvements are supposed to fix, it seems impossible to know whether the solutions make sense. Our guess is that, if built, they would only add to the confusion. More time must be taken to get this right.