Governor Andrew Cuomo is forging ahead with his proposal to add a third track to the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR), said Village of Westbury Mayor Peter Cavallaro at a meeting March 3.
Cavallaro, along with several other mayors from the LIRR line along Floral Park to Hicksville, recently attended a meeting in New York City to talk about the third track proposal. The meeting was led by Cuomo, who spoke on the plan’s benefits. 
“We didn’t expect the Governor to be there,” Cavallaro said. “That tells me it’s important that this project is done. He was there for an hour and a half.”
According to Cavallaro, the governor is trying to diffuse the objections that arose when the third track proposal came up almost a decade ago. His new plan proposes taking less residential property and will also try to eliminate grade crossings, including the one at School Street.
“We met with a representative from the DOT (Department of Transportation) and an engineer from the railroad on how to do School Street,” Cavallaro said. “They’re contemplating putting the road under the tracks. It’s a very narrow corridor so they have to come back with what they think can and should be done.”
The mayor noted that should the project go forward, the impact on the village would be minimal, and would probably just include increased traffic. Cavallaro said the governor is selling the project as a way to not only eliminate grade crossings, but create less delays when there are malfunctions. The governor also denied that the reason they were doing this was to increase freight train access.
“The reason he says he wants it done is they want to create a redundancy,” Cavallaro said. “So people who use the railroad every day don’t have big delays when one track is out. If you have a third track, you can just divert the traffic.”
According to Cavallaro, the governor believes that once the project starts, it will take three, to three and a half years to complete.
