Every 7 minutes on average, a crash causes death, injury or significant damage on Long Island.

Cars playing cat and mouse on the Southern State Parkway.

Motorists regularly pushing 90 mph on the Long Island Expressway.

Drivers casually blowing through stop signs and hitting excessive speeds in residential neighborhoods.

On Long Island roadways, crashes that lead to serious injuries or death often do not involve a singular cause.

Sometimes drugs or alcohol are at play. Other times, it's the weather or motorists driving aggressively or while distracted.

But one thread connecting the bulk of the most serious crashes on Long Island is speed.

"People don't realize just how dangerous speeding is and how much they're increasing the risks of having an accident by routinely speeding," said Stuart Cameron, a former chief of the Suffolk County Police Department. "They need to just slow down…Probably the most dangerous thing that people do on Long Island is to drive their cars."

Robert Brodsky and Michael O'Keeffe report in NEWSDAY that from enhanced driver education and beefed-up enforcement to lowered speed limits and improved road designs, experts contend there are a multitude of ways to reduce Long Islanders' need for speed.

But in a region where most of its 3 million residents use a vehicle to get to work or school or to navigate their daily lives, Long Islanders' desire to quickly get where they're going has made the roads increasingly dangerous, according to data analyzed by Newsday and interviews with more than a dozen traffic safety experts, law enforcement officials and victims of speed-related crashes.

On Long Island, 65 people were killed in 2024 in crashes where police determined that speed was a contributing factor, up from 51 such fatalities in 2019, according to data from the Institute for Traffic Safety Management & Research in Albany. Across Long Island, speed was a factor in more than 35% of all fatal crashes in 2024, the data shows.

Meanwhile, crashes involving serious injuries spiked to a 10-year high in 2024, at 353, according to Institute data.

"Speeding is avoidable — it is dangerous, and it can be deadly," Transportation Department spokesman Stephen Canzoneri said. "There is no question that speeding makes crashes worse on Long Island and across New York State."

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Long Island school districts would see an increase of 3.8% in state aid under New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s budget proposal, which would allocate $200 million more to the region’s schools in 2026-27, a Newsday analysis found.

The proposed aid package for Long Island schools totals nearly $5.5 billion, according to aid projection figures released yesterday.

If approved by the state legislature, the governor’s proposal would boost funding for most school districts in Nassau and Suffolk.

Nine districts would see modest declines in their total aid.

Dandan Zou and Michael R. Ebert report in NEWSDAY that state aid makes up about 30% of the total revenue for schools on Long Island, with the majority funded through local property taxes. School taxation makes up roughly two thirds of homeowners' tax bills.

Governor Hochul's plan calls for a minimum increase of 1% in Foundation Aid for all districts. Foundation Aid is the largest source of school revenue from the state and represents “new money,” compared with expense-based funding that comes in the form of reimbursements, said Bob Vecchio, executive director of the Nassau-Suffolk School Boards Association.

Although the overall amount of Foundation Aid for the region would rise by 2.9% to nearly $4 billion under Hochul's budget plan, educators noted 73 of Long Island’s 121 districts would only see the minimum increase.

“This is an encouraging first step but there’s still work to be done,” Vecchio said of the governor’s...