Key Findings
Nearly 350 people are killed in the United States every year while outside a disabled vehicle on the roadside, according to AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety research — and Long Island’s road network concentrates exactly the conditions that produce those deaths. The Southern State Parkway has minimal or no shoulders along most of its 24 miles. The Grand Central Parkway — an unsigned reference route (NY 907M) — funnels traffic through merge zones with nowhere to stand. Our own events database holds 592 accident records on the Southern State and 285 on the Long Island Expressway, and the single most exposed person in any of those record streams is the one standing next to a car on the shoulder.
This analysis covers where the danger concentrates, what the data and the road geometry say, and the decision tree we recommend — including the free help most Long Island drivers don’t know exists.
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Killed outside disabled vehicles, U.S. per year | ~350 (AAA Foundation) |
| Southern State Parkway records in LIT database | 592 |
| LIE records in LIT database | 285 |
| Southern State shoulder availability | Minimal to none on most of 24 mi |
| Typical lane width, Southern State | 10 ft (modern standard: 12 ft) |
| NY Move Over law coverage (since March 27, 2024) | ALL stopped vehicles with hazards on |
Data note: Figures reflect the Long Island Traffic events database and cited public research as of June 11, 2026. Live counts on our road profiles and accident reports update continuously.
Why the Shoulder Is the Most Dangerous Place on the Road
A car on the shoulder looks parked. The traffic passing it is not. At 65 mph, a vehicle covers 95 feet per second; a driver who glances at a phone for two seconds crosses nearly 200 feet blind. Federal crash data and AAA Foundation research converge on the same picture: hundreds of Americans are struck and killed every year while standing beside a disabled vehicle — changing a tire, checking damage, or simply waiting. Tow operators are killed often enough that the towing industry tracks it as an occupational statistic.
Long Island’s geometry makes this worse than the national average case, for three reasons our most dangerous roads analysis documents in detail:
1. The parkways were never designed for stopping. The Southern State Parkway — Long Island’s most incident-dense road, with 592 records in our database — has minimal or nonexistent shoulders along most of its length. Its 10-foot lanes (versus the 12-foot modern standard) mean passing traffic is feet from a kneeling driver, not yards. The Northern State Parkway shares the same 1930s Robert Moses design constraints. There is, in many sections, simply no place to be.
2. The Grand Central Parkway has the same problem with more traffic. The Grand Central Parkway is an unsigned reference route (NY 907M) carrying Queens-bound commuter volume through sections with no usable shoulder at all. A flat on the GCP between interchanges leaves a driver with two bad options — and one correct one, covered below.
3. Flats cluster — which means exposure clusters. This is not a rare event distributed evenly. In March 2026 we documented dozens of drivers left with flat tires on two state parkways in a single event after pothole strikes — a freeze-thaw cluster pattern that repeats every spring. When a pothole takes out ten tires in an hour, ten families are standing on a parkway shoulder in the dark, often within sight of each other.
The Decision Tree: Flat Tire on a Long Island Highway
The single principle behind every recommendation below: distance from live traffic matters more than your tire, your rim, or your schedule. A destroyed rim costs a few hundred dollars. The shop repairs the tire in 30 minutes. Nothing on the shoulder is worth a Move Over violation arriving at 70 mph.
If the car is drivable at all (it usually is)
A modern tire flat at low speed will tolerate a half mile of slow, hazards-on driving — that is what it costs you to reach an exit, a parking lot, or a wide, lighted shoulder. Rim damage is the known price; it is the correct price.
- Hazards on immediately. Since March 27, 2024, New York’s Move Over law (VTL §1144-a) covers all stopped vehicles displaying hazard lights — passing traffic is legally required to slow down and move over for you. Hazards on is what triggers that protection.
- Exit the highway if an exit is within roughly a mile. On the GCP and the no-shoulder stretches of the Southern State, this is the only good option.
- If you must stop, choose geometry: beyond a guardrail opening, on a straightaway (never just past a curve or crest, where you’re invisible until too late), as far right as physically possible, wheels turned away from traffic.
Once stopped
- Exit through the passenger side. Never stand between the car and traffic, and never work on the traffic side of the vehicle while lanes are live next to you.
- Get behind the barrier if there is one, uphill/upstream of your car. Your vehicle is your crumple zone; don’t stand where it will be pushed if struck.
- Do not change a traffic-side tire on a parkway shoulder. Period. That is a tow call, not a DIY job — the math of 10-foot lanes and 95 feet-per-second traffic doesn’t care how fast you are with a jack.
The free help almost nobody uses
- NYSDOT HELP trucks patrol the LIE and the major parkways during commuter hours — free roadside assistance that exists precisely so people don’t change tires in live traffic. Dial 511 (NY’s traveler line) to report your disabled vehicle; HELP dispatch covers the INFORM corridor.
- 911 is appropriate, not an overreaction, if you’re stopped somewhere with no shoulder and traffic close — police can position behind you with lights, which is statistically the safest thing that can happen to you on that shoulder.
- Suffolk County 311 logs road hazards (including the pothole that got you) — those reports feed repair queues, and our crime and hazard map ingests them.
- Your insurer’s roadside benefit is usually free to use and most drivers forget they have it — see our comparison of Long Island roadside assistance providers.
Afterward
Get the tire inspected, not just inflated — a pothole hard enough to flatten a tire frequently bends the rim or damages the sidewall invisibly. Every town page in our tire shop directory shows live OPEN NOW status, ratings, and tap-to-call numbers for exactly this moment; if it happened near the LIE corridor try Hicksville or Commack, on the South Shore Freeport or Babylon. If the pothole was on a state road, document it — our guide to filing an insurance claim after a Long Island incident covers pothole-damage claims against the state’s window of liability.
The Mathematics of Fifteen Minutes: An Exposure Model
The headline number — fifteen minutes — is not rhetorical. It is roughly what a practiced driver needs to retrieve the spare, jack the car, swap the wheel, and stow the flat. The risk of that interval can be modeled the way an actuary would, as the product of three factors:
Risk ≈ exposure time × passing-vehicle flux × encroachment probability.
Put Long Island numbers into each term. A single LIE lane at moderate flow carries on the order of 1,500–2,000 vehicles per hour; over 15 minutes, 375–500 vehicles pass within a couple of car-widths of you. Federal Highway Administration research on work zones — the best-studied version of “humans standing next to live traffic” — finds lane-encroachment events (a vehicle’s tire crossing the edge line) are not rare anomalies but routine occurrences, concentrated among distracted, fatigued, and impaired drivers. If even 1 in 5,000 passing vehicles drifts a meter over the line, the expected number of encroachments during a single tire change on the LIE shoulder is in the range of 0.075–0.1 — meaning a meaningful fraction of all roadside tire changes experience at least one near-miss. Multiply across the thousands of disabled-vehicle events Long Island generates each year and the ~350 annual national deaths stop looking like freak events; they are the tail of a distribution we can see the body of.
Two structural variables move this risk far more than skill or caution:
- Lateral offset. Crash-risk falloff with distance from the travel lane is steep — this is why the Move Over law’s “one lane of buffer” matters so much. On a modern interstate shoulder you might stand 10–12 feet from traffic. On the Southern State’s vestigial shoulders, the same task puts you 3–4 feet from the lane edge — inside the envelope of an ordinary drift, not just a loss-of-control event.
- Time-of-day. The encroachment probability term is not constant: FARS data show roadside fatalities skew heavily to darkness, when both detection distance and driver alertness degrade. The same 15-minute task at 11 PM on the Northern State carries a multiple of its daytime risk.
The model also clarifies why the recommendations work. Driving a half mile on a flat doesn’t reduce your skill exposure — it reduces t to zero by relocating the task out of the flux field entirely. The 511 HELP truck doesn’t change your tire faster than you would; it parks a 20,000-pound lit barrier between you and the traffic term. Every effective intervention attacks one of the three factors. Nothing you can do with a jack attacks any of them.
The Same Shoulder, a Different Reason: Police Stops
Everything in this analysis about shoulder exposure applies to the other common reason Long Islanders end up stopped on a parkway: a traffic stop. Where you stop, how visible you are, and how passing traffic behaves are the same physics — and for stops there are additional rules about what to do with your hands, your engine, and your documents. We’ve published a companion analysis: Pulled Over on Long Island: Where to Stop, What to Do, and Why the Shoulder Is Still the Danger — the two pieces are designed to be read together.
More From the LIT Data Desk
Dr. Han’s other analyses of Long Island’s public crash record:
- Pulled Over on Long Island: Where to Stop, What to Do
- Long Island’s Most Dangerous Roads: A Data-Driven Analysis
- The Southern State Parkway Problem: Why One Road Leads LI in Fatal Crashes
- LIE vs. Southern State: Which Long Island Commute Is Riskier?
Dr. Dao Yuan Han is the Data Editor & Lead Analyst at Long Island Traffic. He holds a PhD in Mathematics specializing in differential geometry and geometric partial differential equations. His work turns fragmented public crash records into evidence-based road safety analysis. For methodology questions, visit our contact page.