County engineers working on new plan to better sync Route 58 traffic signals

The timing of traffic signals along County Road 58 needs to be corrected, Suffolk County traffic engineers acknowledged this week. But corrective measures won’t be implemented until spring, after the county runs recently collected data through computer models to develop a new signalization plan.

The county has completed a new traffic count survey on Route 58, Suffolk DPW traffic engineer Dan Dresch told RiverheadLOCAL Thursday.

“We’ve collected new data since Costco and Saber opened,” Dresch said, referring to the giant wholesale warehouse on the north side of Route 58 and the Dick’s Sporting Goods shopping center on the south side directly across the five-lane highway.

Both Costco and most of the stores in the Saber Riverhead shopping plaza opened up last year. Both centers share a traffic signal — the newest of 16 traffic signals now on the four-mile-long County Road 58. Eleven of those signals dot the western portion of the corridor, from the terminus of the L.I. Expressway and the traffic circle — a span of just under three miles.

The county in 2009-2010 rebuilt and expanded Route 58 from three lanes to five,to alleviate its notorious bumper-to-bumper traffic.

But last summer, the bumper-to-bumper traffic returned. Town officials blamed poorly timed traffic signals. The lights don’t seem to be in sync, Riverhead Highway Superintendent George Woodson told RiverheadLOCAL last August. “As soon as one light turns green, the next one turns red,” Woodson said. Both Woodson and town engineer Ken Testa had contacted Suffolk DPW about it.

A county spokesperson said last summer the timing of the lights was correct when they were installed but added traffic brought by additional development required the county to reassess and recalibrate them.

That would require doing new traffic counts at different times of day and on different days of the week, Assistant Deputy County Executive Justin Meyers said. Coming up with a correct solution “could take as much as a few months to rectify,” Meyers said.

Last summer, Supervisor Sean Walter was not happy about the time frame for the fix, but now, with winter’s lower traffic volumes, things haven’t been too bad, he said.

“If this is going to be implemented by spring, we’ll be in good shape,” Walter said this morning.

“Everyone loves shopping but with shopping comes a great deal of traffic,” former county executive Steve Levy said at a May 2010 press conference in a Route 58 parking lot where he announced the completion of the highway reconstruction project. The expansion was needed not only for then-existing traffic but for that which would come from all the development then in the planning stages for Riverhead’s “destination retail corridor.” WalMart, Saber Riverhead (Christmas Tree Shops, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Aldi and others), Costco and Lowe’s had not yet been built.

“It was absolutely essential that we had an expanded roadway that could help accommodate all of this extra shopping opportunity that is coming to the Riverhead area,” Levy said. “We said that we would tackle this traffic beast here on County Road 58 and we have indeed,” he said.

“There really isn’t much land left on 58 that can be developed,” Walter said this morning. The large parcels of still-vacant land have a lot of wetlands on them.

Another shopping center has been proposed for acreage on the north side of the road, between the Riverhead Centre shopping center and Osborn Avenue. County engineers said this week not only don’t they like the idea of another signal along the road, they don’t like the idea of another entrance/exit there.

“We were careful to get cross-easements from developers so that adjoining properties could utilize existing curb cuts,” county traffic safety director Dresch said. The developer’s plans also show a point of ingress and egress from the site on Osborn Avenue, he noted.

“You don’t want too many curb cuts or we’ll lose the benefit of the expansion” to a five-lane road, Dresch said.

The development of western Route 58 was done in accordance with the town’s 2003 comprehensive plan and the “Destination Retail” zoning adopted for the Route 58 corridor in 2004. According to the master plan, the Route 58 corridor was slated as the town’s commercial/retail hub. The master plan zoning adopted in areas along State Route 25 west and east of Route 58 does not allow the construction of large retail shopping centers.