A Bridge Too Low: What Is Being Done For Long Island Overpasses?

Long Island commuters are no strangers to traffic. Traffic jams are routinely caused by car crashes, fires, police investigations, weather and more. But there are three words that will elicit groans from every driver on the Island: “unauthorized tractor trailer.”

It is a problem that seems to occur with increasing regularity: a tractor trailer gets on a parkway, and either has to be backed off the road, or worse, strikes the overpass of a bridge. According to the state, there have been more than 575 bridge strikes on New York roadways since 2015.

“Every bridge strike is not only a danger to the motorists and passengers involved, but also exacerbates the very serious traffic problems that Long Islanders experience every day," Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a press release in 2017.

Patch started keeping track. In April, there were 13 unauthorized tractor trailers on Nassau roads, which led to either road closures as the trucks were backed off, or bridge strikes. And those were just the ones we could find. (Suffolk doesn’t track traffic incidents the same way Nassau does.)

Steps are being taken to address the problem, the state says. But as drivers can attest, it keeps happening again and again. What’s wrong with Long Island roads? And why does this keep happening?

Moses and his bridges

There are many roadways on Long Island that have clearances too low for commercial vehicles. According to the state Department of Transportation, they include the Bethpage, Heckscher, Loop, Meadowbrook, Ocean, Sagtikos, Sunken Meadow, Wantagh, Northern and Southern state parkways, and the Robert Moses Causeway.

And, like many infrastructure issues Long Island currently deals with, it can be traced back (mainly) to Robert Moses himself.

Moses, the architect of Long Island, designed many of the parkways in the late 1920s and into the 1930s that we still drive today . According to Geri Solomon, the assistant dean of special collections and Long Island historian at Hofstra University, Moses modeled the early parkways on Long Island after roadways in Westchester.

“The roads were supposed to embody the idea of a ‘park’ way — it was supposed to be idyllic and natural, and you drove through park-like land to get where you were going,” Solomon said. “You were going for a leisurely drive through a natural-looking environment, as driving was one part getting to where you needed to go and one part recreation.”

And, of course, there’s Moses’s famous racism, as well. Many people will say the reason the bridges are so low is because Moses wanted to keep buses from the city — which he assumed would be ridden by people of color - off Long Island’s parkways and away from the beaches. It is a fact famously captured in Robert Caro's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Moses, "The Power Broker."

Trucks, buses and other commercial vehicles, Solomon said, were never intended to drive on the parkways. And they still can’t.

The state DOT has an interactive map that shows all of the height-restricted bridges in the state. While there are federal laws limiting the length and width of tractor trailers, it’s up to the states to set height limits. The federal government says that most tractor trailers fall between 13-and-a-half to 14 feet high.

That’s a problem on Long Island. There are multiple bridges along the Southern State Parkway that are under 9 feet high. Some Long Island roads even have bridges with height clearances less than 8 feet.

Bridge over Cherry Valley

It’s not just parkways where low bridges are a problem. Many local roads also have low overpasses, leaving villages and towns to clean up the mess when trucks strike them.

In the Village of Garden City, there were seven bridge strikes in April alone, most of them at the LIRR overpass at Cherry Valley Avenue, which has a clearance of 10 feet, 4 inches. According to Garden City Police Commissioner Kenneth O. Jackson, the village has met with the MTA to discuss fixes for the problem. The MTA said it will work to add more signage to the bridges to make the clearances more clear, Jackson said, and is considering raising the Cherry Valley Avenue bridge.

The damage to the bridges is usually minimal, Jackson said, but it can still take hours to clear the debris from a strike, especially in more serious circumstances.

“The real issue is that truck drivers need to use commercial GPS systems that alert drivers to low bridges,” Jackson said, “and not rely on non-commercial GPS systems or apps such as Waze and Google Maps.”

A long road to a short bridge

It seems that many bridge strikes on Long Island are caused by commercial drivers using non-commercial GPS units. In April 2018, a coach bus carrying high school students coming back from a trip to Europe struck a low overpass on the Southern State Parkway, injuring multiple people — two seriously — and shearing the top of the bus completely off. Doctors said it was a miracle that no one was killed. The driver wasn’t using a commercial GPS.

Commercial GPS units are different from those drivers would buy at a store, or from the apps you can get on your phone. Commercial GPS units plot routes based on the height and weight of the vehicle, as well as by what materials are permitted on what roads. Commercial GPS units won’t guide trucks or buses onto Long Island parkways.

The state has urged insurance companies to tell their customers to use commercial GPS units. And while the state could pass laws making commercial GPS units mandatory in commercial vehicles, it can’t actually force the companies to install them. Many drivers are still on the road without them, as evidenced by all of the bridge strikes on Long Island.

There are two other ways that the state is combating the issue: signs and technology.

Signs are, of course, pretty basic. The signage is designed to alert drivers to the low bridges on the roads and stop them before they get on the parkways. And if that doesn’t work, hopefully they’ll see the signs before they strike a bridge. (It’s annoying to have to back a truck off the parkway, but faster and easier than cleaning up after a bridge strike.)

The second step involves new technology the state has deployed at a few places on Long Island. The state has installed over-height detectors at 16 entrance ramps to Long Island parkways. The detectors, which most drivers won’t even notice, are sensors that activate if a vehicle over a certain height drives by them. That, in turn, turns on a light-up sign alerting the driver to the low clearance of the road. When the sensor are tripped, it also turns on a camera to start recording the truck and alerts law enforcement.

But those over-height detectors are only at a few locations, and they’re expensive. The first 16 that were installed cost more than $4 million. The recently passed 2019-20 budget includes $25 million for more over-height detectors, but those will be spread throughout the state.

“The New York State Department of Transportation takes this issue very seriously and is working with our partners in government to combat it through a combination of engineering, education and enforcement,” said DOT Spokesman Glenn Blain.

While these technologies are being deployed, Long Islanders are left picking up the pieces. Bridge strikes are an ongoing problem. And with many dozens of entrance ramps to parkways, it’s unlikely that they will all be monitored with over-height devices anytime soon.

It seems there’s not much Long Islanders can do to address the problem other than hope commercial vehicles remember to take the LIE.