The NY State DOT is planning special "info-mercial" sessions late this month to promote its "LITP 2000" plan to widen most major highways on Long Island. The DOT seems alarmed that criticism of the plan is gaining momentum. 

Despite the Pataki Administration's strong interest in environmental protection, the mass transit advances seen during the Governor Pataki's tenure and the fact that the governor pulled the plug on the linchpin project for a Westchester County HOV lane network in 1997, the State DOT's Long Island division and some of the companies that live off of it seem hell bent on nailing down the huge road and HOV expansion plan as the official blueprint for Long Island transportation. 

A March 25 letter mailed to civic groups on "LITP 2000" letterhead warned of disinformation campaigns against the plan, suggesting the April 23 and 24 sessions would be a tonic against the "hearsay and influence of other groups."

In the typically passive voice of bureaucracy, the letter asserts that "[The plan] is viewed as a blueprint for future transportation that can foster coordinated land use planning and growth management at the local level." The letter was signed by Marvin Gersten of Parsons Brinckerhoff. 

However, it is largely because of the plan's complete omission of any consideration of land use and its colossal failure to identify sprawl development as the root cause of car dependence and relentlessly increasing traffic that environmental and civic groups have declared the plan dead on arrival for the past several years. "It looks like we're on our way to more of the same - more paving, more cars, more sprawl, more gridlock and more pollution," Richard Amper, Long Island Pine Barrens Society President, said in a 2000 release backed by other Long Island and regional groups.

NY DOT and its consultants make much of the extensive public outreach LITP 2000 has involved. They tend to express it in the quantitative terms of meetings and videos broadcast. However, the plan has produced anything but a consensus, and critics say most public input has been ignored. 

DOT has looked forward to building downstate networks of HOV lanes since the late 1980s, and no amount of input to the LITP process has changed that. Letters published in the NY Times during 2000 from members of the various public committees originally established by LITP painted the clearest picture of the outreach process. One noted the workings of public committees supposed to shape the study: 
 

When the time came for suggestions, the dept.'s observers (they were not members of the committees) would propose their favorite solutions, like widening roads and building more HOV lanes. Their suggestions would be included in the summary, giving them the appearance of having been endorsed by the committee… 

When DOT disclosed [its] analyses in June, it became obvious that a proposal contained a 'fatal flaw' if it did not involve pouring megayards of concrete or endless acres of asphalt, to say nothing of the destruction of countless trees…. 

Properly carried out, LITP 2000 could have served as a model for cooperation between government and private citizens. Unfortunately, such was not the case. Many volunteers feel we were the victims of a hoax.

So after a $7 million study, we get more of the same - more asphalt, more traffic, more ozone-alert days. If our leaders cannot buck the car culture, why bother to ask the public's opinion? ...The predictable conclusion of the plan to widen roads is an insult to members of the public who took the trouble to take part in the study. As a member of the public committee, I can tell you that widening roads was not a majority opinion… 

Far more than a rational plan to preserve or increase the quality of life on Long Island, LITP is a powerful argument for stripping the NY State DOT of all planning functions. In the post-interstate, multi-modal, contain-sprawl world, the DOT has no clear mission and very limited capabilities. The most direct route to fixing this problem would be to make the DOT into a department of roadway maintenance and construction. Decision making about appropriate transportation investments should be shifted to a new department of multi-modal access, equipped with economists, land use and transit experts, intergovernmental relations specialists, and without the state DOT's inherent highway construction bias. 

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