Letters

I’m Route 27 east-west from the end of Southampton Village all the way to Montauk. I was built about 100 years ago. I used to run through broad stretches of verdant farm fields all the way to Wainscott and eastward through quaint New England-style hamlets.

The insatiable lust for land to develop has pretty much wiped that out over the past 40 to 50 years — and with that my tale of woe starts.

When I was built back in the 1920s, I was state-of-the-art. The communities I served all the way to Montauk were sleepy little country villages. By 9 p.m., there was almost no one on the road until 6 the next morning. There were newspaper trucks making their morning edition runs. The local milkman would be making home deliveries at around 4 a.m. A few tractor-trailers slated to haul potatoes off the East End would arrive at night; their drivers would get some shut-eye in the cab before the loading started at around 8 a.m.

That interim, from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m., gave me a chance to rest. I really don’t get much rest now — perhaps a “cat nap” between midnight and 3 a.m.

The delivery trade starts at around 3 a.m., followed by the “trade parade” from around 5 to 9 a.m. Then very heavy daily commuter traffic anywhere from 2 until 7 p.m., when the “trade parade” reverses course to return home.

You see, there aren’t many middle-class homes to house the thousands of “service” people using my 100-year-old bones to come from “up-island.” To add to my woes, there is really no other road to handle heavy loads, and, frankly, I was never built to handle these loads either.

You see, somewhere around 1969 to 1975, the state had plans for a limited-access four-lane extension of Sunrise Highway from Shinnecock Hills to Amagansett. That never happened, because a group of “naysayers” with a lot of political “clout” hounded the project to its death. The State Department of Transportation dropped the issue with the warning, “You’ll be sorry.”

So, I am expected to handle an impossible load of vehicles, with little or no help from my owner, New York State. Every “improvement” since the Sunrise extension was abandoned has been “makeshift” at best.

The users of Route 27 (Montauk Highway) should be concerned, because the state has not replaced or repaired in a timely or lasting fashion many of my crumbling bones, and I am definitely not safe. It’s almost as if, since their extension project failed, they have taken an “I don’t care” attitude.

In the meantime, they stall, procrastinate and cater to the loud minority who think that “nothing is better than something.”

Tim Maran

Greenport

A longtime resident of Water Mill, Maran now splits his time between Greenport and Hampton Bays — Ed.