From September 14 through October 30, Southampton Village ran a traffic experiment south of Hill Street. While it was underway, Suffolk County changed County Road 39 to the north. Both changes targeted the same afternoon backup, so the village's coming decision on whether to keep its turn restrictions rests on early results that can't be credited to either change alone. The engineer studying the pilot has said publicly that the county's change helped village traffic.
Two Experiments, One Fall
These are the two changes that overlapped this autumn.
| Village Hill Street pilot | County Road 39 restriping | |
|---|---|---|
| Who ran it | Southampton Village, advised by VHB Engineers | Suffolk County Department of Public Works |
| Where | Lee Avenue, Captains Neck Lane and Halsey Neck Lane at Hill Street | Westbound CR 39 between North Sea Road and Sandy Hollow Road |
| What changed | No left turns onto Hill Street from those three streets | The single-lane merge was removed and two westbound lanes restored |
| Hours | Lee Avenue around the clock, the other two weekdays 3 to 7 p.m. | Permanent striping, in effect all day |
| Timing | Scheduled for September 14 through October 30, 2026 | Done while the pilot was running |
The village pilot was built to discourage one particular habit, and the county change ended up affecting that same habit.
What the Village Set Out to Stop
The Village Board's August 25 resolution says residents on streets south of Hill Street had reported rising rush-hour traffic that interfered with their quality of life, including their ability to safely reach their own homes. VHB recommended the left-turn ban to make it "less convenient for motorists to avoid Hill Street by cutting through residential streets south of Hill Street." At Lee Avenue the restriction took the form of a temporary channelizing island, which the resolution calls a "pork chop."
The Board approved it 4 to 1, with Trustee Robert Coburn voting no. The resolution also gave the Chief of Police authority to end the pilot at any time, and it requires the Board to judge whether the program worked and should become permanent.
Before the pilot, the Southampton Press reported that VHB had discussed these approaches for Lee Avenue alone:
- driveway clearance markings
- a temporary wheeled signal
- a channelizing island, which is what the pilot used
- making the northern part of the street one-way southbound
- dead-ending the street
Another idea under discussion would have restricted turns onto Halsey Neck Lane from Ox Pasture and Great Plains roads.
At the August 5 special meeting, residents spoke on both sides. One Hill Street resident said the restrictions would push traffic back into the village and make it harder to reach Jobs Lane. Another urged the village to treat Hill Street as a residential street and supported lowering its speed limit from 30 to 25 mph. A third described bumper-to-bumper traffic that made it hard to get in and out of driveways or to walk and bike. Southampton Fire Department Assistant Chief Richard Fowler and Southampton Village Ambulance Assistant Chief Colby Gill warned that both congestion and turn restrictions could slow emergency response.
Why the County Undid Its Own Merge
The CR 39 change was the end of a separate experiment that had run for about a year. In spring 2025, a pilot that bypassed the three traffic lights west of North Sea Road seemed to show that westbound traffic moved more smoothly without those interruptions. The county then tried a narrower version of the idea. Westbound CR 39 was cut to one lane west of North Sea Road, and Sandy Hollow Road was narrowed to one lane at the junction, so the two flows could merge into two lanes and the Sandy Hollow signal no longer had to alternate between them.
According to the Southampton Press account of the restriping, bypassing only the Sandy Hollow light didn't produce the same results. The forced merge just west of North Sea Road "proved to be problematic and unpopular," and the change "pushed more vehicles — largely guided by GPS apps — onto back roads" as drivers looked for a faster way to the Sandy Hollow intersection.
For about a year, the county's merge was sending GPS traffic onto local roads. The village then launched a pilot to keep cut-through traffic off its own residential streets. Within weeks, the county removed the merge as well, along with the Town Highway Department's temporary lane restrictions to the east and the single-lane restriction on Sandy Hollow Road.
What Early October Actually Showed
Ryan Winter, a project manager at VHB, gave the Village Board an early update. The Southampton Press reported that most of it came from direct observation, with data from the pilot's first two weeks still under review. He said drivers mostly followed the restrictions, even in September, and that Hill Street west of Halsey Neck Lane moved better than it had before the pilot.
He also described some workarounds:
- Some drivers turned right onto Hill Street, turned into Moses Lane, made a U-turn, then turned right back onto Hill Street to head west.
- Others continued up Moses Lane toward Magee Street, a familiar cut-through around parts of Hill Street and CR 39.
- First Neck Lane became more congested in the first weeks as drivers used it to leave the area south of Hill Street, though that eased later.
- Backups from drivers turning onto Moses Lane or Bishops Lane sometimes reached First Neck Lane and Windmill Lane.
Trustee Coburn, the only vote against the pilot, raised the CR 39 restriping at the meeting. Winter's response is central to the December decision. "I think that the change on County Road 39 has helped traffic in the village to a large extent," he said, adding that it eased pressure at the southern access points and encouraged drivers coming from Water Mill and points east to stay on CR 39 rather than cut down Powell Avenue and Prospect Street.
The season was a third factor. Winter noted that traffic had been "waning off" since September and that "even CR39 has been a little lighter the last week or two." VHB collected baseline data in August, when traffic was much heavier, and plans to use models to estimate how the October numbers would look at summer volumes. He acknowledged that the models are not perfect.
So the improvement on Hill Street this fall had three likely causes: the turn bans, the restored second lane on CR 39, and lighter fall traffic. The early observations don't separate them.
What Gets Decided Before Spring
The pilot was scheduled to end Friday, October 30. Southampton Town's notice, posted September 2, gives the same schedule. The next steps run in this order:
- A comparison week in November. VHB planned another week of data collection in November for comparison with the pilot period.
- VHB's assessment in December. The firm will go through the quantitative and qualitative data and present recommendations to the Village Board, which Winter expected to happen at some point in December.
- A Board decision on permanence. The August resolution requires the trustees to decide whether the program succeeded and should become permanent.
If the restrictions stay, they may look different. Winter has said the preferred outcome could be to remove the physical barriers, which would improve access for emergency services and avoid construction impacts. That answers the concern Assistant Chiefs Fowler and Gill raised in August. Mayor Bill Manger told the Board the village had received several emails from residents south of Hill Street approving of the project and reporting better conditions on their streets.
The Road Above Hill Street Is Still Unsettled
The CR 39 change the village's engineer credits with helping is also one stage in a longer county effort. Suffolk County DPW is nearing the end of a two-year study of the CR 39 corridor. The Southampton Press reported that County Executive Ed Romaine wants New York State to take over the five miles from the end of Sunrise Highway to Montauk Highway in Water Mill, and has offered county maintenance of Montauk Highway in Southampton in exchange. In the same report, Romaine described his own preferred fixes: wider lanes, shoulders, an overpass over North Sea Road, and "a circle or some other treatment by the college and the golf course." Those are his ideas, not the study's recommendations.
He also explained why the road is overloaded. Sunrise Highway feeds onto a commercial road that can carry barely more than half as many cars per hour as the highway, and the county's capacity work in the early 2000s fit new lanes into the existing width by making them narrow, with lower speeds and no shoulder. "It's a problem that can be solved, but the solutions are unpalatable to some and very expensive to all," Romaine said.
"We need the political will to get it done," Mayor Manger said at the same event. Southampton Town Councilman Michael Iasilli said he believes community opinion has shifted toward a possible bypass, perhaps using LIRR rights-of-way, because of the weekday congestion the South Fork sees from April through December. The county's CR 39 corridor study page is the place to check for the final report.
For streets south of Hill Street, the December recommendation will cover the village's three intersections. How those streets feel next summer will also depend on whether CR 39 keeps its two westbound lanes and on any later changes to the corridor.
Traffic on the streets around a house is part of what buyers notice, and it can change with a single Board vote. At James R. McLauchlen Real Estate, our appraisers and brokers have followed Southampton Village's streets since 1962. If you'd like to talk about how changes like the Hill Street decision might bear on your property, please reach out to request a valuation and consultation.
