About Hempstead Turnpike
Hempstead Turnpike is the spine of southern-central Nassau County — a four-to-six-lane commercial arterial that carries the New York State Route 24 (NY 24) designation and runs roughly 16 miles across the most densely populated stretch of suburban Long Island. With an estimated 45,000 to 60,000 vehicles per day on its busiest Nassau segments, it is one of the most heavily traveled surface roads on Long Island. It is also, by a wide and well-documented margin, the most dangerous road for pedestrians in the entire New York metropolitan region — a distinction it held at the top of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign’s “Most Dangerous Roads for Walking” list for five consecutive years.
History
The road’s lineage reaches back to the 17th century, when it served as the primary overland route from Jamaica, Queens to the Town of Hempstead, one of Long Island’s founding communities, settled by the English in 1644. By the 19th century it had been formalized as a privately chartered toll turnpike, which is where its name comes from. It was designated NY Route 24 in the 1930s and was briefly the original route number assigned to the Long Island Expressway during construction in the late 1950s — before the LIE was reassigned as NY 495 and NY 24 returned to its Hempstead Turnpike alignment. Today the corridor is lined almost continuously with strip malls, fast-food outlets, auto dealerships, and big-box retail, the classic post-war American commercial arterial.
Route geometry (west to east)
NY 24’s western segment officially begins at an interchange with Interstate 295 (the Clearview Expressway) and NY 25 in Queens Village, where it follows local streets and Hempstead Avenue east toward the Nassau County line. The road takes on the Hempstead Turnpike name as it enters Nassau County at Elmont, immediately passing the Belmont Park racetrack and the adjacent UBS Arena. From there it runs east through Franklin Square, then through West Hempstead and the downtown core of the Village of Hempstead. East of the village it skirts East Garden City, passing Hofstra University and the former Nassau Coliseum site, and crosses the Meadowbrook State Parkway near Uniondale. Continuing east through East Meadow — past Nassau University Medical Center — it reaches Levittown, where it intersects the Wantagh State Parkway, Newbridge Road, and Wantagh Avenue. Farther east it crosses NY 135 (the Seaford–Oyster Bay Expressway) in the Plainedge area, becomes Bethpage Turnpike near the Bethpage State Parkway, and finally reaches Farmingdale, where it ends at NY 110 in East Farmingdale and continues onward as Conklin Street.
Jurisdiction and patrol
The Nassau County Police Department (NCPD) holds primary patrol and crash-investigation responsibility for the bulk of the corridor. The route also threads through several incorporated villages — the Village of Hempstead, Garden City, and Floral Park — each of which maintains its own police department and patrols the segment inside its borders. NYSDOT owns and maintains the NY 24 roadway, signals, and signage. West of the Nassau line, where the road is signed as Hempstead Avenue, patrol falls to the NYPD.
Speed limits and commercial character
Most of Hempstead Turnpike is posted at 40 mph, dropping lower through village business districts. That design speed sits at the heart of the road’s safety problem: a wide, high-speed arterial runs straight through walkable downtowns, transit stops, schools, and apartment blocks, where thousands of people — including children, seniors, and non-drivers — need to cross on foot every day. The dense, driveway-heavy commercial frontage generates constant turning movements and weaving, while long gaps between signalized crosswalks push pedestrians to cross mid-block. The result is a corridor optimized for vehicle throughput but hostile to everyone outside a car.
Dangerous Sections
The following segments are documented hot spots based on NYSDOT crash data, Nassau County’s High Injury Network, and Long Island Traffic’s running corpus of accident reports.
Elmont (Queens border to Belmont/UBS Arena): The western end of the turnpike in Elmont combines dense residential blocks, heavy event traffic from Belmont Park and UBS Arena, and closely spaced signals. The Dutch Broadway and Meacham Avenue crossings are recurring pedestrian-crash locations, and the volume of turning movements drives frequent rear-end collisions.
Franklin Square commercial corridor: Franklin Square’s continuous retail frontage along the turnpike produces one of the highest driveway-cut densities anywhere on the corridor. Multiple closely spaced commercial entrances create constant weaving conflicts, and the Franklin Avenue intersection is a persistent crash cluster.
East Garden City — Hofstra / former Nassau Coliseum: This segment pairs a university campus that physically straddles the turnpike with a major events district. High pedestrian volumes from Hofstra crossing a 40 mph arterial, layered on top of event-day traffic surges, make it one of the more dangerous walking environments on the route.
East Meadow (Carman Avenue / Nassau University Medical Center): The East Meadow stretch runs through dense residential neighborhoods and past the county’s largest hospital while holding arterial speeds. In May 2026, a 70-year-old pedestrian was killed crossing Hempstead Turnpike near Franklin Avenue in East Meadow — see our coverage of the East Meadow pedestrian fatality and the Homicide Squad investigation update.
Levittown (Wantagh Avenue / Newbridge Road): Through Levittown the turnpike maintains 40 mph speeds against a backdrop of schools, parks, and residential blocks. The mismatch between design speed and surrounding land use produces ongoing pedestrian and bicyclist conflicts, concentrated at the Wantagh Avenue and Newbridge Road crossings.
Towns and Communities Along the Route
Hempstead Turnpike passes through (or borders) the following Nassau County communities, listed roughly west to east:
- Elmont (Nassau)
- Franklin Square (Nassau)
- Hempstead (Nassau)
- Garden City (Nassau)
- East Meadow (Nassau)
- Levittown (Nassau)
- Wantagh (Nassau)
- Farmingdale (Nassau)
Each town profile carries its own crash-frequency data, hospital and emergency-services list, and the recent accident archive filtered to that municipality.
Recent Editorial Coverage
Hempstead Turnpike coverage from the Long Island Traffic data desk:
- 70-Year-Old Pedestrian Killed Crossing Hempstead Turnpike in East Meadow — a fatal pedestrian crash near Franklin Avenue that fits the corridor’s long-documented walking-safety pattern
- Pedestrian Killed in East Meadow Crash; Homicide Squad Investigating — the follow-up as the NCPD Homicide Squad took over the investigation
- Pedestrian and Bicyclist Crashes on Long Island: The 91-Record Warning — our data-desk analysis of why suburban arterials like Hempstead Turnpike concentrate vulnerable-road-user deaths
- NYSP: Accident — Property Damage on Hempstead Turnpike — a routine state-police crash log entry from the corridor
For the complete Hempstead Turnpike accident archive, see /accidents/ and filter by road.
Accident Statistics
Hempstead Turnpike consistently ranks among Nassau County’s highest-crash roads by total annual volume, with reported collision counts in the range of roughly 1,200–1,600 crashes per year across the corridor based on NYSDOT Motor Vehicle Crash data and New York Open Data crash records. What sets the road apart is not raw volume but its pedestrian toll: people on foot are killed and injured here far out of proportion to traffic levels.
The evidence is long-standing and external. The Tri-State Transportation Campaign ranked SR-24 (Hempstead Turnpike) the most dangerous road for walking in the entire NY–NJ–CT region for five consecutive years, documenting 14 pedestrian deaths between 2009 and 2011 alone. A separate Newsday review of 2005–2010 data found 32 pedestrians killed and at least 427 injured in 457 pedestrian crashes on the corridor. Regionally, roughly 60 percent of pedestrian fatalities occur on exactly this type of wide, high-speed suburban arterial. NYSDOT and Nassau County have responded with countermeasures — pedestrian countdown signals, longer crossing phases, new crosswalks, and dedicated left-turn lanes — and Nassau County has placed multiple segments of the turnpike on its High Injury Network for targeted safety investment, but the corridor’s fundamental geometry continues to drive elevated pedestrian risk.
For the most current picture of conditions on the road right now, the Live Accident & Traffic Reports section above pulls directly from 511NY and our own ingestion pipeline.
If you were injured in a Hempstead Turnpike collision, it helps to know your rights before talking to an insurer.
