On a chilly Monday afternoon longtime Levittown resident Arnold Johnson finally had his chance to be heard.

Johnson stood on the southeast corner of Wantagh Avenue and Miller Place with a folder about an inch thick, filled with written correspondence between himself and Nassau County officials regarding the installation of two left turning lanes at the intersection of Miller Place/Cotton Lane and Wantagh Avenue. He vehemently articulated his case to Legislator Dennis Dunne, Sr., Town Councilman Gary Hudes, Acting Director of the Town of Hempstead's Traffic Control Division Gary Sauer and Assistant Director of Traffic Engineering for Nassau County Ray Ribeiro.

"It's just not right," Johnson said. "Look at the way people speed down this road. Something needs to be done. I don't care how much education or traffic signs you give these drivers, you have a road and you have to adjust that road to the drivers."

Currently Wantagh Avenue is four lanes wide at this location. Two lanes direct traffic northbound and two lanes direct traffic southbound. When a vehicle needs to make a left turn onto either Cotton Lane or Miller Place, traffic behind them can build up. Sometimes cars will sprint over into the next lane in order to avoid waiting for that car to make the left turn. This is when Johnson says accidents occur.

"I even had a accident here in the 1960s," Johnson said.

According to Ribeiro, this is a location where a lot of things need to happen before these turning lanes can be installed.

"We would need to restrict parking along the shoulders of the road and that would mean eliminating the parking spaces," Ribeiro said.

There a stretch of commercial property along the east side of Wantagh Avenue which is home to Levittown Park Bake Shop, GAP Travel, Ralph's Italian Ices and one other store. If these parking restrictions were instituted, their customers would be left without parking.

"You would have to retain the parking for these businesses," Sauer said.

Ribeiro explained that he was looking at the situation from an engineering standpoint and could not put his stamp on something that was substandard.

"I can't simply take that situation and replace it with another," Ribeiro said. "The shoulder is asphalt and drainage could be an issue."

Councilman Hudes suggested shifting the parking to the west side of Wantagh Avenue where there is one residential home and a sump. He implied that the sump should provide enough drainage.

"We need to see what the county would require in order to make this intersection safer," Hudes said.

Ribeiro said this solution would involve moving a hard island in the middle of the road and that could also pose problems. He also said that he realizes it is a very dangerous situation and that the county would love to put left turning lanes in locations such as these, but that it isn't always feasible.

"Our major concerns are safety, not impacting the stores and the neighborhood around the area and the impact of the cost of the project," Ribeiro said. "We can come up with a conceptual plan and estimate the cost of the project, but the county's budget has been severely cut and every project will be scrutinized."

Ribeiro also said that traffic counts are a deciding factor as well and that a summer 2004 study revealed that there was not an extremely large amount of cars in that intersection.

Legislator Dunne said that if Ribeiro can "give me the schematics I will put in for capital improvement monies." While Sauer asked that updated traffic counts be done as well, "so that they are not from the summer."

Manual traffic counting is not an acceptable method to Johnson. He would like the county to use bumper markers on the ground, so that when vehicles cross the intersection there are counted electronically.

"Traffic counters are only the legal and acceptable way to count traffic," Johnson said.