The NY State Thruway Authority is likely to recommend widening the Thruway to six lanes between Woodbury and Newburgh, an 18-mile stretch through Orange County. Ramesh Mehta, a leading Thruway official, said he expected an Authority study of the road between Woodbury and New Paltz to recommend adding lanes. He made his remarks last week at a transportation forum in New Windsor organized by the Orange County Chamber of Commerce and other groups.

If proposed, the Thruway expansion would be one of the largest highway widening plans under consideration in downstate New York. The Thruway is presently developing a six-year capital program. The Thruway is reportedly seeing record levels of traffic at interchanges in the area.

The policy question that environmentalists and others will undoubtedly raise is whether the road needs to be widened in response to traffic created by the march of sprawl development across Orange County, or whether the expansion will mainly promote further sprawl northward?

The announcement also likely adds a new wrinkle to the joint Thruway/Metro-North effort to build a new Tappan Zee Bridge. The likelihood of northward Thruway expansion, combined with congestion relief at the Tappan Zee, will need to be included in the land use impact models for the project.

In contrast to Mehta’s remarks, Robert Dennison, head of the NY State DOT’s Poughkeepsie office, said the DOT was focusing more on reliability than capacity. According to the Times Herald-Record of Middletown, he avoided saying that casino development in Sullivan County would necessarily require the widening of Route 17. 

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